Folly #69: Outcomes
Metrics that overwhelm.
Just this week I had yet another conversation with a nonprofit leader who was describing their impact. Only they weren’t.
They wrote a beautifully worded plea for support to fund … activities. It’s so much easier to describe how many – emails sent, website visitors, event attendees. But these are not the outcomes of a nonprofit’s work.
Outcomes (aka impact) is what people do with the information and attention you provide. How does it change their behavior, their lives, or our larger world?
What nonprofit can afford a data analyst?
In the high stakes world of social impact, it can feel completely overwhelming to define outcomes. If only you had a position focused on data! Or a PhD down the hall who could throw together some models and metrics.
Instead, you and your team are working crazy hours just to meet community needs for your programs and services.
When I teach fundraising for small nonprofits, students often express frustration that their nonprofit has to create all sorts of measurement because funders request it. That’s not the reason to measure.
Of course, the reason to know how well your organization creates behavioral or social change is important to you, not funders.
Navigating a broken feedback loop.
Nonprofits work in a disconnected market system. Users don’t pay for the cost of services provided – donors do.
In our imperfect market reality, how does a nonprofit know its program works?? How do you define outcomes and impact when your clients are disenfranchised? Gathering longitudinal data may be impossible when the population you serve is transient or, understandably, distrustful of information gathering.
Defining outcomes is a place where foundations can share metrics they see used by other nonprofits working in that issue area.
If a rising tide lifts all boats, understanding the tide table gives you frame of reference!
Funders see a range of activities and outcomes among their grantees. And because they typically focus their funding on a handful of issues, each foundation is capturing tremendously valuable data in those issue areas.
Ask better grant questions about outcomes.
These are grant application questions that I see all the time:
Describe how you measure outcomes.
Provide the percentage of clients by ethnicity, gender, income, military status, etc. (This question really gets me, especially when the funder, not the nonprofit, is defining “buckets” of people served that must add up to 100%!)
Imagine if, instead, funders acknowledged that data collection is specialized, difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. What if these were the questions that funders asked nonprofits about outcomes?
What is difficult about gathering data for your programs?
Which is more important to you in achieving mission success: go broader (reach more) or deeper (more intensive work)?
Would it be helpful for you to talk with one of our program officers to hear some examples and best practices that we have seen in linking activities, outcomes and data collection for this issue area?
What additional amount of funding would you need to define and begin to gather the quantitative and qualitative metrics you’d like to know about your impact?
Are there other resources (e.g., technical assistance, interns, conferences) that we could provide to support your program evaluation?
On the note above about broader or deeper, we’ll be launching a podcast soon for small-staffed nonprofits to share their stories of how hard fundraising can be. One of our first interviewees will tell you why bigger outcome numbers aren’t necessarily better.
Stay tuned. Sign up. Share.
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