Who Are We? An Introduction

By Jessica Payne

Welcome to Mockingbird Analytics! We’re so glad you’ve found us!

We’d like to think of this blog as a place for us to have virtual coffee with you – to chat about what we do and who we are, to answer your questions, and to discuss issues you might not have even thought of yet. Let us tell you a little about ourselves.

Mockingbird Analytics, founded by Jessica Payne in 2015, is a research and evaluation company focused on fostering the good – assisting non-profits in telling their stories, discovering their strengths and challenges, and ultimately growing. While statistics are a large part of what we do, we’re about more than just numbers.

We work with non-profits all over America, ranging from children’s theater programs to small, fledgling environmental and social good organizations. Our goal is to help them discover how best to collect and analyze information from both within the organization and the people they wish to help. We then use this data to help the programs implement best practices – and they can, in turn, use the facts and statistics to measure their progress in a real, evidence-based way when looking for solutions to problems or applying for funding.

We’re making the intangible… well, tangible, softening what can seem like an endless stream of cold, sterile data and shaping it into an approachable, meaningful story. And that can mean a lot – for potential donors, for company morale, and for the community the organization serves.

We are also a Benefit Corporation, legally defined as a business designed to create “…a material positive impact on society and the environment.” To put it in simpler terms that aren’t quoted directly from a legal statute - CA AB 361, if you were wondering - we want to do good, make ethical decisions, and spread positivity in both the workplace and the world.

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird inspired our name. One of the most famous lines reads, “Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

To us, the best non-profits are those mockingbirds, and we share a common goal: to create a better world. We want to help all mockingbirds soar.

In the coming months, we’ll tell you about our board members, show you best practices for research, and explain how to implement evidence-based practices that are becoming industry wide standards, among other things. If you have any questions or topics you’d like to see addressed, please let us know in the comments! We’re all ears – well, okay, technically, we’re only maybe 1% ears by body weight, but we’re listening nonetheless.

Thanks for stopping by. We hope to see you again soon!