Did you know the average human sees over 5,000 advertisements a day?  How many thousands of grant requests does a foundation receive each year?  Each ad, each grant request, hopes to catch attention and inspire a change in thought or action.  With all this clutter, how can you make your message stick?   Shock and awe…or data?  

You've done an evaluation and you're doing ongoing performance measurement.  You are on top of your measurement game.  You have all this hard data that suggests what you're doing works and that your model deserves to be grown to scale.  But you're struggling to get people to listen.  You believe you deserve their support, but can't seem to get potential funders, policy makers, etc. to see it the same way.  Why?

Does impact really matter to donors?

During the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) International Conference last week in Baltimore, the outgoing Chair of AFP offered a new definition of ROI: Results, Outcomes and Impact. While the words themselves can mean different things to different people, the message was clear. Donors want more than just a relationship with an organization and moreover, they want more than a testimonial or a picture. They want to know that their gift, or investment, has produced a tangible and meaningful result for the organization and/or its beneficiaries. This is certainly the case for more and more institutional funders, including foundations and corporations, and it is increasingly true for individual donors. 

We've all read an annual report that lists each grant made in detail, page after page of painful details in some cases.  Ok, so they gave $2,000,000 to the Mr. and Mrs. Do-good Foundation.  I wonder what they were able to do with that money.   I wonder why they chose $2,000,000. If it's such a good cause, why not $3,000,000?

For the last 15 years I have been focused on a single knotty question: how do you measure social impact?   Across the sector, billions have been spent on evaluations, millions have been spent on capacity building, thousands of studies have been published and hundreds of conference sessions have been held.  Yet no one seems to have come up with the answer.  How is it that we can measure the temperature on Mars, but we can’t measure what happens within the orbit of a nonprofit organization?  Why is measurement so confounding?  

It’s pretty common for most grantmakers to track the number of lives touched and dollars distributed to grantees. Those data points are great to know and sound like they have “impact” but they don’t really help grantmakers figure out what to do next. 

Nonprofits fall on difficult financial times. Competition for funding is getting fierce. Foundation endowments decline by 25%. Donors want to understand their return on investment. Organizations are closing their doors.  While these are the current and most pervasive headlines about the nonprofit sector, there is another kind of conversation and groundswell of activity percolating: how to best measure or assess social impact. It is no longer enough for organizations to say that they do good work because their mission statement references the social change that they aim to generate. Today, more and more organizations are looking for, developing and finding meaningful ways to understand and communicate the results of their work. 

We often start our workshops and training sessions with examples of Charity Navigator’s nonprofit ratings data. We compare an organization with a four star rating to one with a one star rating and based on the data and ask the group to select the organization that should receive a $10,000 grant.

  CSR, nonprofit, and foundation professionals see the fall leaves turn and smell something in the air – conferences. The economy didn’t change the attendance numbers, energy, or engagement at this year’s Independent Sector Conference in Detroit, Michigan or the NetImpact Conference in Ithaca, New York. This particular thoughtscrap will focus on the highlights from the Independent Sector Conference in Detroit, Michigan.    The opening plenary by Melody Barnes, President Obama’s chief domestic policy advisor, was nothing short of insightful and inspirational. I’m glad she gets to play golf with President Obama.