Meemli is a 501c3 nonprofit providing high quality learning experiences and academic support free of cost to the students who lack access to them. Our programs are personalized, live and remote, with teachers and mentors meeting the students where they are as they need only a device and internet connections to participate.

We're planning to expand our free after-school academic support offering for grades 5–8, and we need data showing that community need for this kind of support is large enough to justify the expansion.

We already track pre/post academic assessments for enrolled students and collect feedback from parents of enrolled families (though full participation is hard to achieve). What we're missing is evidence of demand and unmet need beyond our current enrollment — data on families in our target communities who aren't yet in our programs, to show funders the scale of the gap we'd be addressing. Right now we only have general data on student performance and demographics, not a clear picture of how many families need this kind of support and aren't getting it elsewhere.

We're looking for help to build a practical approach to measuring and documenting community need, including:
* A needs-assessment framework/plan for gauging demand for after-school academic support and enrichment among grades 5–8 families in our target communities (enrolled and not-yet-enrolled).
* 1–2 survey or interview templates designed to reach prospective/non-enrolled families remotely and capture unmet need (e.g., current access to academic support, barriers to access, interest in a free virtual option).
*Recommendations on outreach and participation strategies suited to reaching under-resourced, time-constrained families aren't already connected to Meemli — since we can't rely on our existing enrolled-family channels for this.
* Recommendations for low-cost tools, platforms, and other resources we can use to collect, distribute, and manage this data given our limited budget (e.g., survey/form tools, outreach channels, data storage/organization options, and potential partnerships with local educational organizations, such as student groups looking for practical projects).
* Guidance on how to synthesize the resulting data into a funder-ready case for the scale of unmet need.

Success looks like a lightweight toolkit our small team can run ourselves to produce credible need/demand data for use in our proposals.

Success means Meemli can show funders concrete evidence of unmet need for quality after-school academic support and enrichment in the communities we serve — not just limited data from families already enrolled, but a documented picture of demand among those we aren't yet reaching. This directly strengthens our case for expanding the grades 5–8 offering and gives us a repeatable way to validate future program growth against real community need.

Ultimately, success for our organization is growing our reach to serve more students, funded by approved grant applications that leverage the data collected by this effort!

Organization Mission

Meemli’s mission is to make great learning experiences accessible to all students to empower academic success and build brighter futures. Meemli offers quality academic support and personalized attention through our online programs, and we help the students who most need our support to build confidence and academic success and enjoy learning.