Social Sector Hero Spotlight: United Way Worldwide

By: Adam Luecking
October 28th, 2022

Social Sector Hero Spotlights tell stories of exemplary social and public sector organizations that are making measurable differences in their communities. The following United Way Worldwide 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. 

Table of Contents

1. Who is United Way?

2. Answering, “Why Invest in United Way?” – the Birth of the Global Results Framework

3. Key Players in the UW Saga

4. Utilizing a “less is more mindset” to accelerate progress on the UW mission

5. Maintaining relevancy, creating buy-in, and amassing sponsors

6. Creating and sharing UW’s measurable results

7. Ayeloa Fortune’s top tips for creating buy-in and driving donations

8. Key Take-Aways

1. Who is United Way?

United Way (UW) is a global, diverse network of over 1,100 local nonprofits serving communities in 42 countries. With $5.2 billion in revenue reported in 2021, it is the largest charitable organization in the United States. It is also the largest nonprofit organization as measured by public donations. UW’s main purpose is driving community change to help people to live good lives, most often by working to ensure that everyone has access to quality education, economic opportunity, and the ability to live healthy lives. Each United Way is independent, with its own donors, partners, and funded agencies.

2. Answering “Why Invest in United Way?” – the Birth of the Global Results Framework

In 2015, Social Sector Heroes at United Way Worldwide realized they needed a common measurement framework for every UW affiliate to report on to document the Network’s collective reach and impact. This led them to develop the Global Results Framework (GRF) — a set of core reach and outcome indicators in key impact areas used to report progress. Impact areas include Childhood Success, Youth Success, Economic Mobility, Access to Health, and Community Engagement. The GRF is designed to demonstrate social impact, highlight shared strategies and approaches across the United Way Network, and motivate potential donors to give. To accomplish this, the GRF aggregates results across United Way communities to accomplish four main goals:

1. Demonstrate shared return on social investment
2. Simplify and align results
3. Convey the scale of impact across markets and geographic locations
4. Create a compelling story and narrative to drive action

What prompted these efforts? This is only part of the story, but national partners and multinational corporations communicated a desire to understand why they should invest in the entire United Way network, rather than donating directly to nonprofits funded by UW. The fundraising landscape is hyper-competitive, and it has become easier for nonprofits to fundraise directly from corporations. To convince investors of the network’s value, UW used aggregated GRF results to demonstrate how they were uniquely positioned to leverage necessary resources for change and maximize the potential for impact on shared priorities across funded partners and local United Ways.

3. Key Players in the UW Saga

I got involved with UW in 2017 when Evan Hochberg (former Chief Strategy Officer at United Way Worldwide) spearheaded the search for a performance management platform that supported the UW and GRF’s purpose and mission. Part of Evan’s big strategic plan was to strengthen and maximize UW’s relevancy for fundraising. There were a few other Social Sector Heroes who got involved too: Alicia Lara, former Senior Vice President of Impact, Ayeola Fortune, former Senior Director of Impact and Global Results, and Jeff Elder, former Director of Social and Economic Research (all at UWW).

4. Utilizing a “Less is More Mindset” to Accelerate Progress on the UW Mission

The first time I met with Alicia, Ayeola, and Jeff, they came to the table with a list of more than 80 measures for affiliates to report on after working with a prior consultant. And I get why the first list was long  — United Way’s hyper local approach enables the Network to serve thousands of unique communities with varying needs. Similar circumstances usually prompt funders to develop an absurd number of measures. However, UW understood that this was way too many measures for their Network to report on, and they cut many of them throughout a series of discussions internally and with their Network. Their new challenge was to create indicators that were high-level and could simultaneously reflect the diversity of strategies, approaches, and strategic investments.

There are two main ways UW utilized the ‘”ess is more” mentality to simplify participation in the new GRF and performance management systems. First, after much discussion and emphasizing the value of “less is more,” we cut the list of 80 down to 48 measures, with an average of 12 measures per UW result focus area:

1. Childhood Success
2. Youth Success
3. Economic Mobility
4. Access to Health
5. Community Engagement

Secondly, UW made it even easier for affiliates to get started by allowing them to opt-in to the action areas where they did their best work. To make performance reporting more manageable, United Ways were allowed to pick a minimum of one measure in any of the four impact areas to report on. While some larger United Ways could report on more, it was important to support every United Way that wanted to participate. All this simplification lowered barriers to entry and made it more feasible for even small United Ways to participate in the GRF.

5. Maintaining Relevancy, Creating Buy-In, and Amassing Sponsors

Alicia once referred to this project as “UWW’s moonshot” to maintain relevance in their fundraising efforts. The GRF allowed UWW to run reports of impact by geographic region that were important to certain corporate donors in order to maintain their competitive advantage. The result? United Way had already amassed an impressive list of corporate sponsors prior to the GRF efforts, however, the GRF helped shore up UW’s value proposition related to several companies’ long-term investments.

United Way has amassed an impressive list of around 200 corporate sponsors over the years, across an array of industries, including American Express, Amazon Smile, Starbucks, Wells Fargo, Microsoft, the National Football League (NFL) Foundation, and many more.

Ayeola’s proudest moment was in 2020 when, four years into the GRF, there was buy-in and support across UWW internally and across the entire network of individual UWs. The GRF was now operationally institutionalized. Everyone could see that the GRF produced tangible and measurable outcomes that UWW could bring to fundraising conversations with corporate partners. These were things like, “7.1 million people accessed healthy food and physical activity” and “billions in tax returns generated.” A few corporate partners were so convinced that they began asking for advice on how to do performance measurement! Unfortunately, due to extenuating circumstances, UWW had to pause data collection in 2021, but this doesn’t detract from prior measurable results.