September 19th, 2022
By: Adam Luecking

When it comes to the important work of social impact, racial equity, and community well-being, it isn’t enough to have good intentions. Our actions as public servants must reflect those intentions, and we must constantly ask ourselves whether we are living up to them. If we aren’t, we must re-evaluate (with good and reliable data) and change course where necessary.

Not only should we be making a difference, but the difference must also be measurable. We must fall in love with the process of collecting, analyzing, and acting on data if we want to make a positive impact that lasts. You must measure and share your performance and impact data to move from magnificent intentions to magnificent impact.

Effective measurement will help you make better decisions. You’ll be able to determine which programs are working, which might work better with some changes, and which are actually draining your resources with no measurable results. You’ll be able to appropriately reallocate resources and funding to the programs making the greatest impact, allowing you to accelerate towards your goals faster. Again, you’ll be ensuring you’re not just an organization of good intentions but an organization of even greater impact.

Measuring and sharing your impact may also help you increase the giving that is the lifeblood of your operation. According to one study, 87 percent of charitable giving is produced by individual donors. At least 41 percent of these donors base giving on an organization, funder, or agency’s effectiveness and transparency.

Individual donors produce eighty-seven percent of charitable giving. At least 41 percent of these donors base giving on an organization, funder, or agency’s effectiveness and transparency. (Fidelity Charitable)

So how will you know if there is a return on your social sector investments? What systems, actions, and tactics will make it all possible? What evidence exists to support different approaches to measuring and improving social and public sector impact? Well, that’s what my company Clear Impact has been working on figuring out over the past 15 years and what I’ve condensed and laid out in my recent book, Social Sector Hero.

Along with my colleagues at Clear Impact, I have learned a lot while establishing performance management and reporting systems for clients across the globe. Generally speaking, it’s better to start simple. Breaking down your largest ambitions and goals into smaller, more digestible pieces will develop the necessary foundation to achieve sustained change. Your system may get more sophisticated as you learn and grow, but you do not need to do everything perfectly from the beginning. An obsession with perfectionism is what breeds and propagates procrastination. Just get started, and you’ll be surprised at how much faster you’ll progress on your journey to impact.

Simplifying our initial approach does not mean that this work is easy or that the social conditions we aim to change are simple. Again, small chunks. We are just breaking things down a bit so that we don’t give up on our magnificent intentions.

Here’s a simplified approach to establishing a performance measurement process and system to help you get started (each strategy will link to an additional article, designed to help you understand and implement the strategy).

8 Strategies to Move from Intention to Impact

  1. Set up your Common Purpose, which includes both Result(s) and Indicator(s), shared among partners and utilized to guide all strategies and activities. Read more >>
  2. Continually ensure that you hold yourself and your partners accountable for “living” the Common Purpose through aligned measurement and strategies. Read more >>
  3. Avoid engaging in any extraneous activities and/or collecting unhelpful data that distracts you from your most important mission. Read more >>
  4. Disaggregate your data by race, gender, age, or any other factors to truly understand the state of well-being in your community. Read more >>
  5. Establish a handful of similar measures for each comparable set of programs, and allow grantees to report on a handful of optional measures that speak to their unique circumstances. Read more >>
  6. Never ask grantees to report on data without a narrative or Story Behind the Curve. Read more >>
  7. Utilize Effective Questions, based on the work of Doug Krug, to guide your conversations with grantees. Read more >>
  8. Share your Indicator and Performance data publicly to create greater alignment, stoke urgency for your cause, build trusting relationships, invite more funding, and foster collaboration for results. Read more >>

If you want to be effective, you must make data-based decisions on your social investments and then clearly communicate the effect of those decisions to individual donors, stakeholders, and the public. This means striving to achieve the greatest impact with existing resources (or even less). It means engaging in disciplined performance measurement and cross-sector collaboration to analyze the effect of your strategies on population outcomes. It means helping your grantees be the most effective they can be through guidance, regular communication, and standardized reporting processes. Ultimately, you will be helping to improve the relationship between funding and impact for all of us. One giant leap for humankind!

You can learn more about how to move from good intentions to even greater impact in a free download of Social Sector Hero – How Government and Philanthropy Can Fund for Impact.