We help mission-driven teams figure out what matters, and what to do next.
Good ideas deserve more than good intentions.
They deserve structure, clarity, and a path forward.
The napkin is where ideas become visible.
It’s where we sketch what’s working, what’s not,
and what’s next; together.
From the Trenches to Your Team
We’ve sat where you sit.
Writing grants and RFPs late into the night.
Communicating impact to boards, funders,
and community partners.Implementing initiatives across siloed departments
with competing priorities.Trying to make data useful, not just reportable.
Our team combines expertise in evaluation design, data analysis, systems thinking, facilitation, and organizational strategy, shaped by hands-on experience across nonprofit, higher education, public health, and philanthropic settings.
We understand the pressure, the time constraints, and how quickly good ideas collapse under complexity.
How We Work
We Make Complexity Usable
We translate complex evaluation, strategic planning, and systems concepts into practical tools your team can use. You don’t need a PhD to make strong decisions; you need clarity and confidence in the expertise you already bring.
Our work helps teams recognize the knowledge they already hold and use it with intention.
We Design for Engagement
We involve the people closest to the work in shaping strategy, defining measurable outcomes, and strengthening implementation. Shared ownership leads to clearer decisions and stronger implementation.
We design structured processes people want to engage in because participation improves alignment, strengthens judgment, and increases follow-through.
Engagement isn’t a distraction from rigor; it strengthens it.
We Make it Last
We don’t build systems that depend on us.
We build capacity so you can run them long after we’re gone.
Different format. Same rigor.
Every engagement is grounded in established evaluation frameworks, research-informed facilitation practices, and disciplined strategic design.
The result is strategy and evaluation systems that inform funding, guide operations, and create clear feedback loops for continuous improvement, all while holding up under scrutiny.
Our Founder
Dana didn’t set out to become an evaluator; she became one out of necessity.
As funding shifted toward results-based accountability, she immersed herself in evaluation, data systems, and performance measurement to keep her organizations relevant, funded, and effective.
In local, state, and national leadership roles, she saw how often strategy and evaluation were treated as something to be handed down, prescribed by templates or technology platforms rather than shaped by the people doing the work. Programs were told to “just run a pre/post” or adopt a standard model, regardless of context. Too often, teams were left implementing systems they had little role in designing.
She learned that for a strategy to work, in theory and in practice, the people responsible for implementing it must help design it. Participation is not inclusion for its own sake; it is how systems hold under real-world conditions.
Today, her work sits at the intersection of evaluation, systems design, and organizational strategy. She combines technical rigor in evaluation design and data analysis with research-informed, structured facilitation grounded in adult learning and participatory practice.
Dana founded Back of the Napkin to prove that rigor and accessibility are not opposites. Her approach builds disciplined, durable strategies grounded in established evaluation frameworks and designed for real-world implementation.
Creative tools are not the point of her work; they are the vehicle. The goal is alignment, stronger decisions, and systems that improve programs faster while holding up under scrutiny.
She speaks and facilitates nationally on evaluation, strategic design, and building organizational cultures where data informs action rather than compliance.
Principles That Drive Our Practice
These principles guide how we scope projects, structure engagements,
and build evaluation systems that reflect context and shared priorities.
We design processes that shift power, not just gather feedback.
Strategy Starts with Context
Many challenges our clients face are rooted in
systemic inequities that disproportionately affect communities
along racial, ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic lines.
We do not treat that context as separate from strategy; it
shapes the way strategy must be built.
We name power dynamics in the room
and design around them; who speaks first, where we meet,
how decisions are made, and whose data is prioritized.
We Interrogate Our Own Assumptions
We come to this work from positions of privilege and recognize
our responsibility to question our assumptions, confront bias,
and design processes that expand agency rather than concentrate it.
This commitment is not an add-on.
It is embedded in how we structure meetings, design
evaluation systems, interpret data, and define success.