The Diplomatic Academy of Vienna

The George Washington University

Stanford University

Vice President of Evaluation & Learning at First Place for Youth

Oakland, California, United States

As VP of Evaluation and Learning, Matt Levy is responsible for the measurement and evaluation of programs and new interventions implemented by First Place for Youth in CA and with national partners in support of transition-age foster youth (18-24). He also oversees and implements the organization’s data systems from AWS to Power BI, creating state-of-the-art dashboards, ensuring automated ETL processes function, and driving the implementation and sale of a new proprietary and predictive analytics tool: the Youth Roadmap Tool. He also plays a key role in steering the organization’s innovation agenda, leveraging test + learn techniques to pilot interventions, surface learnings, evaluate success, and when successful, support scaling.

He is expert in data visualization, scripting in R & SQL, and leveraging human-centered design to co-create dashboards with users to ensure data drives action. Increasingly, he is leveraging an equity and participatory lens in his work, supporting the organization’s transition to become an anti-racist organization

First Place for Youth

Vice President of Evaluation & Learning

Oversee and manage the organization's evaluation and learning department, responsible for all data systems (case management system, data warehouse, SQL, R, data visualization) and strengthening the culture of data and impact to maximize the organization's ability to make meaningful changes in the lives of those we serve (transition-age foster youth).
Serve as innovation co-chair driving top-down innovation/change in addition to facilitating effective and impactful bottom-up ideas too.

Director of Data & Performance Management

- Wrote scripts in R to automate data cleaning, wrangling and reporting of key datasets to support the expansion of an existing pilot as well as support a state-wide program report accurately to the legislature
-  Leveraged and combined available, internal data (for the first time joining them together) to drive the prioritization of future interventions of the Digital Services team
-  Designed experiments to measure the impact of team prototypes and interventions
-  Created dashboards and reports in Google Analytics to understand traffic, set up Google Optimize to facilitate the start of A/B testing, and created user guides for the existing web team to leverage these tools more effectively going forward

Judicial Council of California

Data Scientist (Consultant)

Manage HLG’s first data-science driven, SaaS/service offering, focused on measuring and forecasting corporate reputation risks and opportunities for public affairs and communications professionals at Fortune 500 companies and leading trade associations.

By applying data science to the practice of issues management, we have helped our clients launch major new initiatives around responsibility and sustainability.

Regularly present analytic findings and strategy recommendations to clients and prospects.

Developed natural language processing, string-matching algorithms for 200+ topics in R, classifying and quantifying millions of unstructured data points in order to derive business insights and C-Suite strategy (replacing low accuracy machine learning models). Thanks to implementation of this system, we benefit from 10x+ efficiency gains, having eliminated the need for 100+ team hours each month refining topic models.

Built, and now managing, HLG’s analytics team, offering a new career path and skillset to benefit the firm’s clients in quantitative analysis and data visualization.

Spearheaded the development of new product deliverables, increased product scalability by halving the amount of time to create client-facing reports, and partnered with product management and engineering to create scalable systems to automatically ingest, classify, quantify, and visualize data for analyst workbench and client-facing dashboards.

High Lantern Group

Senior Director of Issue Analytics

Led analyst teams to answer clients’ narrative problems in the government, foundation, and corporate spaces, including:
- Acquired, gathered, and analyzed 1000s of unstructured data points using a variety of NLP and machine learning techniques;
- Visualized data in Tableau to derive actionable insights; and
- Delivered collateral to clients, with 100% of my customers satisfied to the extent that they purchased additional research

Iterated and innovated upon the Narrative Analytics method, including:
- Tested and successfully executed the firm’s first project in a foreign language
- Piloted and executed a new approach using demographic metadata to yield valuable new insights
- Created new metrics and incorporated high-value data streams to strengthen analytic rigor and output

Monitor 360

Lead Analyst

I helped manage the innovations component, on behalf of ChangeLabs' work with the Resilient Africa Network with its hub in Uganda at Makerere University, to support the transfer and diffusion of innovation and scaling methodologies, as part of a $22 million USAID-financed project.

Toward that end, I planned, executed and led a design ethnography training and pilot study to Western Uganda and created video learning modules. In addition, I helped lead the rewrite of the organization's core strategy documents and website to reflect our radical mission to create large-scale transformation.

Stanford ChangeLabs

Strategy and Systems Design Consultant

I led a three-person team to address a critical MCC research question regarding their impact in partner compact countries (aka the "MCC effect"). We employed econometric analysis to determine the MCC’s impact on investment and development assistance in compact countries. In the process, we created a unique dataset with over 100,000 data points.

The Millennium Challenge Corporation

Consultant

I conducted research on comparative legal systems in the U.S. and India related to corruption and whistleblowing culminating in a comprehensive paper on private sector corruption in India. The working paper includes policy recommendations for the private sector, government officials and citizens.

On behalf of the organization, I spoke about their work at the World Habitat Day conference held in Oslo, Norway on October 7, 2013. My remarks can be watched online starting just before the 5 hour mark: <a href="http://habitat-norge.org/live-streaming-of-the-habitat-conference-2013/">http://habitat-norge.org/live-streaming-of-the-habitat-conference-2013/</a>

Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy

Pro Bono Consultant

Provided research support to a group of Stanford professors within CDDRL on the state of American democracy as well as surveyed the existing literature on the topic. Much of the research utilized a comparative perspective to understand what, if anything, the US case has in common with other advanced democracies.

Center for Democracy, Development & Rule of Law

Graduate Research Assistant

- Consulted with the Latin America and Caribbean team on proposal development and the planning and implementation of governance-related programming
- Managed the $300,000 program, Transatlantic Dialogue on Democracy Support, which convened senior policymakers and officials of bilateral and multilateral aid agencies, organized all conference operations; designed and developed a two-year report; completed donor reports; tracked budgets and handled the accounting for seven grants that supported this project
- Assisted with coordinating international parliamentary delegations’ visits to the U.S. as part of the House Democracy Partnership and the Institute for Representative Government programs
- Supported the Community of Democracies Parliamentary Forum for Democracy (PFD). Responsibilities included providing technical assistance on strategic and operational documents, assisting in the organization of events and liaising with key partners to expand the PFD’s governing body and membership