“True flexibility can be achieved only when all muscles are uniformly developed.”
– Joseph Pilates

August 22, 2022
By: Adam Luecking

My four kids have wildly different personalities. One is extremely shy, one is outgoing, one goes along to get along, and one prefers to just be left alone. Despite these differences, my wife and I try to maintain consistency in our parenting style and expectations when it comes to how the kids treat us, themselves, and other people.

Consistency is one thing, but fairness is another. What does it mean to be fair? For me, it means that the way we define and measure success for each kid is flexible — tailored to their personality, values, and aspirations. We want them to have equal opportunities to succeed and grow as individuals. We also want them to have fun and derive fulfillment from whatever they’re doing. When it comes to our kids, my wife and I attempt to balance consistency and flexibility.

Similarly, grantees need consistency and flexibility to successfully meet expectations, while supporting their own unique communities. The main way to do this is for you (the funder) to establish a handful of similar measures for each comparable set of programs (e.g. all mentoring programs, all workforce training programs, or all after-school programs). You can then aggregate these measures to tell a story of impact. Additionally, you should always give your partners the flexibility to report an additional handful of measures that reflect their unique goals and communities.

So what does it look like to be consistent and flexible at the same time?

Consistency: The Skeleton Key to Progress

Consistency = everyone doing everything the same way (or everyone doing a core set of things the same way), in the interest of accelerating progress on a Common Purpose.

In more practical terms, this means defining consistent performance measures across like programs. For example, if you’re looking at an after-school program or have a series of after-school programs, each should have two or three consistent measures. Besides telling your aggregate story of impact, identical performance measures allow you to quickly gain a sense of whether or not your investments were worth it.

For example, some consistent measures that you may want to use to track progress for all after-school programs could include:

  • # of students attending the program weekly
  • % of returning students, or student retention
  • % of students with improved academic performance

Other Ways to Practice Consistency

Enforcing a few identical performance measures is a great start, but this isn’t the only realm in which consistency is important. You should also require grantees to use the same tools for collecting and reporting data. This means every grantee uses the same data management systems to collect, analyze, and report their data. Why? One centralized system allows for better analysis between programs. It also increases the ease of navigation and organization of data.

Similarly, using a consistent framework (or frameworks) for creating social change, making budgeting decisions, and performance improvement will allow for better capacity-building, organizational alignment, and smaller learning curves. Consistent frameworks will allow you and your grantees to make aligned decisions and track collective progress. At Clear Impact, we endorse the Results-Based Accountability framework because of its proven ability to turn curves and create lasting change in communities.

Flexibility: Where Paths Diverge

Flexibility = People can be creative in how they design strategies, measure success, tell their story, and do the on-the-ground work in support of a Common Purpose.

If all my talk of consistency has worried you that there’s no room to treat your partners as unique individuals, rest assured – I’m not recommending a robotic approach to your work. Especially since 73% of employees feel that flexibility increases their satisfaction at work and 78% feel that flexibility makes them more productive (I got this statistic from a private sector study…but social sector employees are still employees after all).

As long as you’ve got some core standards like goals and values, you can be extremely flexible on how partners align with and achieve these standards. Allow people to be creative in the “means” to your “ends.” Flexibility increases the chances you’ll discover new and different strategies to create impact. At the end of the day, flexibility honors uniqueness and invites innovation that accelerates progress.

One of the main ways you can improve your flexibility is to allow each grantee to report on a handful of optional performance measures that speak to the unique qualities of their communities, programs, and priorities.

For example, I once worked with an organization that funded between 30 and 40 different mentoring programs at any given time. In trying to figure out a performance management reporting system across partners, we realized that mentoring was delivered differently. Sometimes, it was delivered in a group setting and sometimes it was one-on-one. To account for these differences, we came up with three consistent measures across all the programs and 20 optional measures that partners could select based on their mode of operation. With this, each partner could maintain focus on common goals and values while also telling their unique story of community impact.

Learn More About How to Balance Consistency and Flexibility

If you want to learn more about how to balance consistency and flexibility in your agency, foundation, or organization, check out chapter six of my book Social Sector Hero – How Government and Philanthropy Can Fund for Impact. In this chapter, I also explore consistency and flexibility in the context of language and grantmaking. Balancing consistency and flexibility is just one of eight core strategies I’ve designed to help you maximize the impact of your social investments.