Our Impact Begins With Access
At The Open Economics Project (OEP), we believe that access to high-quality economics education should not depend on where someone lives, their financial circumstances, or the educational opportunities available to them.
Our mission is to make economics education freely accessible to learners and communities around the world.
We pursue this mission through digital educational resources, open textbooks, essay competitions, grassroots workshops, ambassador-led initiatives, and partnerships with schools, libraries, and nonprofit organizations.
But making resources available is only the beginning. We also want to understand who we reach, how our materials are used, and whether our programs create meaningful educational opportunities.
We measure impact by examining the reach of our resources, the engagement they generate, the communities we serve, and the educational value we create.
We recognize that no single statistic can capture the full impact of an educational organization. Our approach therefore combines quantitative data, program-level reporting, and feedback from the communities involved in our work.
1. Measuring Our Global Reach
Expanding access to free economics education is at the center of OEP's mission.
Our website allows learners to explore educational materials without requiring payment or mandatory account registration for publicly available resources.
To understand the scale of our digital reach, we use website analytics and traffic data from Google Analytics and GoDaddy.
Lifetime Unique Users
When OEP publicly reports its total number of website users, the figure represents lifetime unique users recorded by the designated analytics provider over the stated measurement period.
This differs from the number of website visits, sessions, or page views.
We review information from both Google Analytics and GoDaddy, but publish a figure from one designated provider rather than adding the two user counts together.
We do this to avoid inflating our reported reach through overlapping measurements.
A lifetime unique-user figure is an analytics-based estimate, not a verified count of distinct human beings who have used OEP across every device and browser. The same person may be counted more than once under some circumstances, and analytics tools may exclude or undercount certain activity.
Website Views and Engagement
We also examine website views and other engagement indicators to understand how visitors interact with OEP's resources.
Google Analytics and GoDaddy may report different figures because they use different measurement methods.
For transparency, we report website-view figures from GoDaddy and Google Analytics separately, identifying the source rather than combining their totals.
Website views help us understand interest in our resources and overall website activity. However, repeated views do not necessarily represent additional individuals or educational progress.
Geographic Reach
OEP's website has received visitors from more than 97 countries, as reflected in our website analytics from Google Analytics and GoDaddy.
This international reach helps us understand where our resources are being accessed and where there may be opportunities to expand educational availability.
Geographic information is generally approximate and does not establish a visitor's nationality, residence, or level of educational engagement.
Updating Our Statistics
We aim to update our publicly reported website statistics monthly, using the available analytics information.
Where relevant, we identify the reporting period, the data source, and any significant limitations in interpreting the figures.
Our goal is to provide a transparent picture of our reach without overstating what website analytics can demonstrate.
2. Understanding Educational Engagement
Providing free resources is an important first step. Understanding how learners interact with them is essential to improving their quality.
At present, OEP's measurable digital learning activity is primarily based on website engagement information.
This can help us understand which pages and resources attract visitors, how users navigate the website, and which content may benefit from improvement.
Our educational platform also supports browser-based storage for certain learning progress and preferences, including for users without registered accounts.
Because some of this information remains within an individual's browser, it may not be centrally available to OEP for evaluation. Website engagement analytics therefore should not be interpreted as a complete record of individual learning activity.
As our digital learning resources develop, we intend to build more meaningful ways to understand educational engagement while respecting user privacy.
Our long-term objective is to look beyond simple website traffic and better understand whether resources are helping learners develop economic knowledge.
3. Evaluating Learning Outcomes
We believe that educational quality matters as much as educational reach.
Over the next twelve months, improving our educational resources and strengthening our ability to evaluate learning outcomes will be important organizational priorities.
A central method we intend to develop is the comparison of learner performance across comparable practice questions and assessments.
By examining performance on questions that assess related economic concepts, we hope to better understand where learners demonstrate understanding, where misconceptions persist, and where additional instructional support may be beneficial.
We recognize that meaningful educational evaluation requires careful consideration of question difficulty, prior knowledge, assessment conditions, and other factors that may influence performance.
Improved performance across comparable questions may provide useful evidence of learning, but does not automatically prove that OEP alone caused the improvement.
As measurement capabilities develop, we aim to use these findings to:
- Improve explanations and instructional materials.
- Identify commonly misunderstood economic concepts.
- Refine practice questions and assessments.
- Evaluate the usefulness of different educational resources.
- Make learning experiences clearer and more effective.
Until these methods are implemented and sufficient evidence is available, we will distinguish planned learning evaluations from measured educational outcomes.
4. Measuring Our Educational Programs
OEP's impact extends beyond its website.
Our educational initiatives create opportunities for students, educators, volunteers, and community organizations to engage with economics in different ways.
We measure each program according to its particular purpose, activities, and available evidence.
Essay Competitions
Our essay competitions encourage students to explore economic questions, develop arguments, and engage with economics beyond traditional classroom instruction.
We focus on indicators including:
- Participant registrations.
- Completed essay submissions.
- Schools and educational institutions represented.
- Countries represented by participants.
These measures help us understand the accessibility, participation, and geographic reach of our competitions.
We distinguish registrations from completed submissions, recognizing that initial interest and completed participation represent different levels of engagement.
As our competitions evolve, we may introduce additional methods for understanding participants' educational experiences and the opportunities created through these programs.
Grassroots Workshops and Community Outreach
OEP supports educational workshops and community-based programs intended to bring economics education to learners in different settings.
We evaluate these initiatives through:
- The number of workshops and educational events conducted.
- Attendance and participation.
- Feedback from participants and, where applicable, partner organizations.
These measures help us understand the extent of our outreach and whether participants find the activities valuable.
As our programs develop, we may incorporate additional feedback or evaluation methods to better understand educational outcomes.
Attendance alone is not treated as proof of improved economic understanding.
Ambassador Initiatives
Our ambassador network helps extend OEP's educational mission into communities around the world.
We consider two dimensions especially important when evaluating the impact of this network.
Geographic Reach
We examine the number of active ambassadors and their geographic distribution to understand the breadth of our community network.
Local Community Impact
We also seek to understand the educational activities, outreach efforts, and opportunities ambassadors create within their own communities.
Depending on the initiative, this may include workshops organized, students reached, institutional collaborations established, educational materials distributed, or other documented community contributions.
We recognize that the number of ambassadors alone does not capture the value of their work.
Our goal is to understand both how far our ambassador network reaches and what its members accomplish within the communities they serve.
Where community outcomes are reported, we aim to distinguish documented activities from estimates or anticipated benefits.
Open Textbooks and Educational Distribution
OEP's educational publications and open educational resources are intended to reach learners beyond our digital platform.
Our book distribution and institutional outreach initiatives may be evaluated through:
- The number of educational books or resources distributed.
- Countries reached through distribution initiatives.
- Schools receiving educational resources.
- Libraries receiving educational resources.
- Partner institutions participating in distribution.
These measures help us understand the scale and geographic reach of our publication efforts.
Where appropriate, we may also seek feedback from recipient institutions concerning how the materials are used.
We recognize that distributing a textbook does not necessarily demonstrate that it was read or that learning outcomes improved.
5. The Broader Impact of Open Educational Resources
OEP believes that openly licensed educational content can multiply the value of educational work by allowing others to share, translate, adapt, and redistribute resources.
Our approach to open educational publishing is designed to support teachers, students, libraries, community organizations, and other institutions that want to expand access to economics education.
We aim to understand the broader reach of our open resources through indicators such as known distributions, translations, adaptations, and institutional use.
However, openly licensed materials can circulate independently of OEP.
A school may print a textbook, a teacher may adapt a lesson, or a community organization may translate a resource without notifying us.
As a result, our directly recorded statistics may not reflect the full reach of these materials.
We consider this an inherent feature of open educational distribution. Our priority is to make resources useful and accessible, not to require that every act of reuse be reported to OEP.
Our approach to permitted reuse is explained in our Content Licensing Policy.
6. Combining Data With Community Feedback
Numbers provide valuable information, but they cannot fully describe the experiences of learners and communities.
We also value feedback from students, educators, workshop participants, ambassadors, volunteers, and institutional partners.
This feedback can help us understand whether educational materials are clear, which barriers remain, and how our initiatives can better serve their intended audiences.
We aim to use community feedback to support decisions about resource development, outreach priorities, accessibility, and educational quality.
Personal experiences and testimonials can illustrate the value of a program, but we distinguish them from evidence demonstrating outcomes across a broader population.
Both quantitative and qualitative information have an important role in understanding our work.
7. Responsible and Accurate Measurement
We believe that transparency is essential to maintaining trust with learners, educators, supporters, and partner organizations.
Our impact reporting is guided by several principles.
Accuracy: We seek to report figures that can be supported by available records, analytics, or program documentation.
Clarity: We distinguish users, website views, registrations, submissions, attendance, distributions, and other indicators rather than treating them as interchangeable.
Consistency: We aim to use comparable definitions and reporting methods across reporting periods.
Context: We recognize that figures may be affected by differences in measurement tools, incomplete records, changes in technology, and the nature of individual programs.
Privacy: We seek to use information responsibly, particularly when working with students and minors.
Where information is incomplete, estimated, or based on a particular measurement method, we aim to make those limitations clear.
We do not treat projections as completed achievements or claim educational outcomes that our available evidence cannot substantiate.
Our handling of personal information is described in our Privacy Policy.
8. Quarterly Impact Reporting
Transparency is a continuing responsibility at The Open Economics Project.
OEP has published a quarterly impact report for every quarter beginning with Q4 2025.
These reports provide a recurring opportunity to document organizational progress, review our educational initiatives, and communicate our work to the communities and institutions that support our mission.
Our impact reports are intended to reflect the breadth of OEP's work, including digital education, competitions, grassroots outreach, ambassador initiatives, educational publications, and institutional partnerships, as relevant to each reporting period.
We intend to continue publishing impact reports on a quarterly basis.
Alongside these quarterly reports, we aim to update our headline website statistics monthly.
By maintaining both regular website statistics and broader quarterly reports, we can communicate immediate developments while providing a fuller picture of organizational progress over time.
We recognize that individual reports may vary in the activities and indicators they cover as our programs and measurement capabilities evolve.
9. Improving How We Measure Impact
Our impact measurement practices will continue to develop alongside the organization.
Some measures, such as website traffic and program participation, are easier to collect than others.
Understanding educational improvement, long-term learning, and community-level outcomes requires more thoughtful evaluation.
In the coming year, we intend to place particular emphasis on:
- Strengthening the quality of our educational materials.
- Developing methods to evaluate learning through comparable practice questions.
- Improving the consistency of program-level data collection.
- Better documenting the local community impact of ambassador initiatives.
- Gathering useful feedback from learners and partner institutions.
- Improving the clarity and reliability of our public impact reporting.
These are areas for continued development, not claims that all measurement systems have already been implemented.
We will adapt our methods as we learn which indicators most effectively reflect our mission.
10. What Impact Means to Us
The Open Economics Project exists to expand access to economics education.
A learner discovering a free resource, a student participating in an essay competition, a library receiving educational materials, or an ambassador organizing an activity in their community can each represent a different form of progress toward that mission.
We value the breadth of our reach, but we also recognize the importance of educational quality, meaningful engagement, and lasting community benefit.
Our approach to measuring impact is therefore grounded in a simple principle:
We measure our progress not only by how widely our resources reach, but by how effectively they help make economics education available, useful, and meaningful to the people and communities we serve.
As OEP grows, we remain committed to evaluating our work, communicating our results responsibly, and improving the educational opportunities we create.
The Open Economics Project Atlanta, Georgia, United States Website: https://openecon.org Contact: contact@openecon.org