One of a nonprofit leader’s most persistent challenges is the inability to prove individuals, families, and communities are better off because of the work you do. Although you are making a positive impact in your community, it may seem that there are not enough hours in a week to measure the true impact of your programs and services. And funders want reassurance that their investments are truly creating lasting social change. In addition, many nonprofit leaders are struggling with a high rate of staff turnover, while also trying to manage an increase in demand for services.
An organization’s success is driven by its ability to accurately gather and interpret data in order to share the organization’s impact story in a compelling manner. In a nutshell, you need data to be able to demonstrate what you do, how well you do it, and the long-term impact on those you serve.
The goal of this post is to share tools, tips, and resources to help you consistently collect, manage, and share data to create a powerful impact story. In addition, we will discuss the benefits of streamlining your data management across the organization.
Define Your Success
Great social-good organizations define their success by the distinct impact they are making and the effectiveness of the services they deliver relative to the resources at their disposal. Leaders of these organizations ensure success and improve on the success they achieve by gathering data through measures aligned with stated goals and outcomes. They carefully measure outcomes and impact over time on an individual, program, and organizational level.
Organizations must use a variety of measures to tell their story. At a minimum, organizations should track data on participant demographics, services delivered, cost and revenues, participant and stakeholder feedback, and key outcomes. Before you can define your success, leaders need to determine what you want to know and what you want to do with data collected through the selected measures. To define how you will measure success, start by answering the following questions:
- What contributions to the world are you hoping to achieve with your advocacy, campaign, or activities?
- How do you know if you are making progress?
Establish Outcome Measures that Demonstrate Your Organization’s Unique Impact and Value to Society
Once you have determined what success means to your organization, you can then determine the specific measurements and KPIs that accurately reflect your organization’s holistic impact and the particular outcomes, outputs, activities, and inputs that go into it. The best outcome measures:
- Quantitatively reveal important information about the organization’s services, as well as the processes that support them
- Are tools to help decision makers understand, manage, and improve what the organization does
- Tell the story of how well an organization is fulfilling its mission
Using your answers to the questions above, consider what data you’ll need to collect. Each data point you track should offer an observable, quantifiable answer to one of three corresponding questions:
What was done?
“What was done” tracks outputs, including things such as demographics, who was served, and what services were provided.
How well was it done?
“How well it was done” provides insight into the quality of the programs and services provided. Did the recipients of the services feel they were valued? Were their needs met? Were the services delivered in a way that was digestible by the individuals?
“Who is better off?”
“Who is better off” demonstrates what changed for individuals and families as a result of your programs. Were they able to find full-time employment that improved their standard of living? Did their overall health improve?
In order to determine what outcomes you specifically want to measure, a good place to start is with your mission statement. For example, why does your organization exist? What is the heart of the challenge you are trying to address? The next place to look is at your funder’s goals and objectives. What is their mission and the motivation behind their funding decisions? How can your organization align with your funder’s goals to highlight the success of their funding efforts? And lastly, you need to listen to the needs and wants of the people you serve. When you integrate these three points of view together, you are better able to make decisions that address the needs of all stakeholders and lead to the long-term stability of your organization.
Establish a Clear Process for Collecting Data
Once you have determined how to measure success, the next step is to establish a clear process for collecting data across your organization. Organizations that have data-driven cultures are unified in their focus on clear and measurable objectives.
Software specifically designed to automate and simplify the process of collecting and sharing outcomes and impact data in will make it easier for you to share your organization’s impact story in a compelling manner. During the course of doing business, staff should record client demographics, services, and outcome measures you need to prove your beneficiaries are better off because of the work you are doing. It’s important to have a system to centrally manage multiple programs with different reporting requirements.
Share Your Impact Story
Successful non-profit organizations use data to powerfully illustrate their authentic success and inspire belief in the organization’s ability to fulfill the promise of its stated mission. Before you can communicate your impact, it’s important to create a strong impact story. For nonprofits, an impact story is a narrative statement that combines anecdotal and quantitative evidence to help readers understand the changes that resulted directly and indirectly from your programs and services.
Before you begin the process of building an impact story, ask yourself (and your team) the following questions:
- Who is the audience for this impact story?
- What is the purpose of this impact story?
- What is the problem this story will tackle?
- What is the solution this story will suggest?
- How will you share this story?
Use your responses to these questions to guide the designing, revising, and sharing of your impact story. Interactive digital reports are an engaging way to showcase your impact, educate your audience, and thank them for their support. They also enable you to link directly to your donation page from within the report.
Share Across Your Network
Finally, in order to truly benefit from measuring your nonprofit’s impact, you need to communicate your impact measurement results across your network.
Social-service collaboratives bring together a variety of organizations in order to match the unique needs of communities and help them thrive. Collaboratives are responsible for building a strong social-service infrastructure that increases the capacity of participating organizations and dramatically improves outcomes for those receiving services.
Using technology facilitates shared data collection across all members of the collaborative, whether they are a direct service provider, funder, or other stakeholder. By implementing the same mechanisms to track and report outcomes and measure participant needs across all participating organizations, collaboratives can more easily understand what is driving change across their network.
For more information about how to simplify and automate outcomes and impact data collection across your organization, check out this on-demand webinar “Back to the Basics: Impact Measurement.”