Motivation Touchstones Part 3: Definitions

A well-crafted Motivation Touchstone contains your success criteria and aimed-for rewards, as well as a summary of the major restrictions and parameters that your project faces. These elements give us its outline, the scaffolding required to make decisions throughout the project, and in terms of equity, they provide us with an opportunity to make decisions in those areas that prioritize the people and perspectives that we want to center.

The third part of a Motivation Touchstone is a little different. It holds your key definitions, their sources, and their statuses.

When we’re using data to make decisions or answer questions, we need to translate terms, ideas, and concepts into something measurable. In order to do that, everyone interacting with the project — the people working on it, the people giving data to it, the people funding it, and anyone accessing the output/report — need to have a clear understanding of what the terms we use mean and how we went about turning them into numbers and back out into meaning.

Let’s say that our general mandate or mission statement for this data project is:

“To measure the current financial health experienced by the young women of Chicago”.

This project is undertaken by an organization that runs a variety of programming for young…