Social Sector Hero Spotlight: Baltimore City

By: Adam Luecking
November 9th, 2022

Social Sector Hero Spotlights tell stories of exemplary social and public sector organizations that are making measurable differences in their communities. The following Baltimore City spotlight is an excerpt from “Social Sector Hero – How Government and Philanthropy Can Fund for Impact” by Adam Luecking. You can download the book for free here and read all 16 Social Sector Hero Spotlights. 

Baltimore, Maryland City Hall

Table of Contents

1. One Good Government Guy’s Quest for Outcomes Budgeting

2. OutcomeStat: Allocating Funds to Outcomes…Not Agencies

3. Priority Outcomes and Key Indicators

4. Utilizing a “less is more mindset” to create and protect alignment

5. Creating and sharing Baltimore’s measurable results

7. Andrew Kleine’s top tips for creating buy-in and driving donations

1. One Good Government Guy’s Quest for Outcome Budgeting

Andrew Kleine is currently Senior Director of Government and Public Sector at the global advisory firm EY-Parthenon. As his LinkedIn profile says, he truly is “Good Government Guy.” Without his efforts, Baltimore City’s OutcomeStat initiative may be a figment of our imagination.

Andrew joined the City of Baltimore in 2008 as the Budget Director. He spent a decade in this position during a tumultuous time of political scandal, economic crisis, and civil unrest. Andrew found his own wizard of sorts in his quest for good government in Baltimore: in The Price of Government, David Osborne and Peter Hutchinson describe a common-sense approach to “squeezing more value out of every tax dollar” called Budgeting for Outcomes. The book — or journey map if you will — inspired Andrew to bring what he called Outcome Budgeting and, ultimately, OutcomeStat to Baltimore. Outcome Budgeting makes outcomes the starting point for budgeting — instead of last year’s spending plan. Budgeting becomes about funding outcomes instead of organizational units. It’s about using data and evidence to make budget decisions. For example, an agency engaging in Outcomes Budgeting will reward programs that get measurable results and repurpose dollars from programs that don’t.

2. OutcomeStat: Allocating Funds to Outcomes…Not Agencies

The OutcomeStat initiative grew out of a desire to integrate Baltimore’s strategic planning, budgeting, and performance management processes, which were largely siloed and uncoordinated. Andrew tells a detailed story about OutcomeStat in City on the Line: How Baltimore Transformed Its Budget to Beat the Great Recession and Deliver Outcomes. While learning more about OutcomeStat could be useful to you, it is not the focus of this article, so I point you to his book to learn more (forgive me for the side-quest). When you do get your copy, check out Table 1.1 on page 12 for a summary of the changes in Baltimore’s budgeting process.

To initiate OutcomeStat, Andrew took the “Less is More” philosophy to heart. This mindset aided the creation of the city’s Common Purpose (labeled Priority Outcomes) and accompanying measures of success (Key Indicators). The City established seven Priority Outcomes with an average of three Key Indicators for each (see Table 1 below, adapted from “Baltimore City OutcomeStat Indicators”). With Outcome Budgeting in mind, Andrew’s guiding principle for the City’s budget was to “purchase” measurable improvements for each Priority Outcome and Key Indicator. As a result, funds were allocated to Outcomes — not agencies.

3. Priority Outcomes and Key Indicators

Baltimore City’s Common Purpose (Priority Outcomes + Key Indicators):

4. Utilizing a “Less is More Mindset” to Create and Protect Alignment

An important innovation of OutcomeStat was to bring together more than 200 partners from inside and outside of city government to develop Turn the Curve plans for each Key Indicator. For the first time, the City had a single set of consensus plans to guide agency budget proposals and the Mayor’s budget decisions.

To create buy-in and align city management, Andrew required each of the city’s 250 services to report exactly five Performance Measures each. This approach to performance reporting continues to this day under the leadership of Budget Director Bob Cenname. Revisiting the tip on succession from the previous United Way Hero’s Journey Spotlight, you should “think about sustainability in your staffing, coordination, tools, and resources.” Bob was Andrew’s deputy for seven years, so the buy-in was already there. This created continuity in the budgeting journey.

Ultimately, the sustainability of the collective effort rests largely on the “less is more” approach from the beginning. If the City had requested double or triple the measures from funded services (10 or 15 as opposed to five), the services may have revolted as they have in so many other contexts and locations. Performance reporting would have been far too time-consuming and less useful. Progress may have stalled or broken down completely.

To get agencies even more focused on the most critical results, Andrew asked them to build Turn the Curve Plans for one outcome-oriented performance measure per service. This step was supported by the Clear Impact Scorecard software platform, which was adopted by Baltimore’s CitiStat performance monitoring program. Until OutcomeStat, CitiStat had been stubbornly low-tech, relying on spreadsheets to track data.