Connect your community’s economic goals to the strategies and partnerships needed to move them forward.
Introducing New Growth Innovation Network's guided assessment for economic, community, and city leaders that provides a personalized summary of your community’s strengths, areas for growth, priorities, and next steps, informed by local context, relevant indicators, and lessons from other communities.
Take the AssessmentStronger Partnerships. Stronger Economies.
How the Tool Works
Select the economic and community outcomes you are working toward and explore strategies supported by our evidence base.
Identify your community and see the capabilities and types of partners needed to carry your selected strategies forward.
Reflect on the capabilities and partners already in place and assess the strength of your current partnerships.
Download a personalized summary with key insights, priorities, and recommended next steps for your community.
How Partnership Powers Economic Growth
The transformative changes communities need rarely come from a single organization. They usually require complementary interventions and joint capabilities across sectors. Successful community-driven economic outcomes depend on strong partnerships that can advance a portfolio of work around a shared goal and sustain it over time.
What Evidence Informs the Tool's Insights
Built on insights from NGIN’s Economic Partnership Alliance and a curated evidence base of roughly 300 evaluations, studies, and reports, this tool uses AI to analyze this research at scale, with every source screened for evidence quality. Each strategy, indicator, capability, and partner is grounded in the evidence and informed by NGIN’s experience working with coalitions to strengthen local economies.
How We Built It
This tool combines NGIN’s experience working with regional coalitions, hundreds of research findings, local data, and AI-assisted analysis to help communities turn economic goals into evidence-informed plans for action.
We Defined the Goals and Strategies
We started by identifying the economic and community goals coalitions commonly work toward and the strategies used to advance them.
The framework draws on NGIN’s work with 24 regional coalitions, along with research and guidance from federal agencies, national research institutions, academic studies, and leading evidence clearinghouses.
Through multiple rounds of research and refinement, we identified 15 goals and 21 strategies that form the foundation of the tool.
We Built the Evidence Base
Next, we looked for evidence showing what happened when these strategies were implemented in real communities.
Using AI-assisted research, we reviewed 4,500+ search results and screened nearly 480 reports and evaluations from government agencies, foundations, research institutions, intermediaries, and academic sources.
Our final evidence base includes 321 documented findings. Every source was manually reviewed to verify the information and how it was categorized.
We also conducted a separate review of 28 documented coalitions to understand how organizations coordinated across strategies, divided roles, made decisions, and structured their work.
We Connected Strategies to Measurable Outcomes
For every source included, we documented what strategy was used, where and with whom it was implemented, how it was evaluated, and what outcomes were reported.
That process identified 675 distinct indicators across economic and community outcomes, including employment, earnings, business performance, housing stability, safety, and access.
We also recorded whether reported effects were positive, negative, or showed no measurable change. When studies provided a specific measured effect, we captured that too.
We Identified What It Takes to Implement
Evidence can tell us more than whether a strategy produced results. It can also help us understand what had to be in place to make it work.
We reviewed the evidence for three types of enabling factors:
Capabilities: The functions and resources typically needed to implement a strategy.
Actors: The organizations that typically provide or support those capabilities.
Coordination: How organizations working toward similar goals structured their roles, relationships, and decision-making.
The tool uses these findings to help you identify the ecosystem your selected strategies may require.
We Added Your Community’s Starting Point
Your insight summary incorporates local data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates.
The tool provides a baseline picture of your community using indicators such as population, income, poverty, and educational attainment, along with additional indicators connected to the strategies you select.
This helps ground the evidence in the conditions of your community today.
We Deliver Your Results
Finally, the tool brings the research together with what you know about your local ecosystem to highlight what’s already strong, what may be missing, and where to focus next.
Your personalized summary will be available to review at the final step of the assessment. Download a copy to keep a record of your results, share with colleagues and partners, and begin planning how to move your recommended next steps forward.
Explore the Program That Inspired This Tool
The Economic Partnership Alliance helps economic development and community-based organizations build stronger cross-sector partnerships through training, capacity building, technical assistance, and resources informed by work with communities across the country.