Social Sector Hero – How Government and Philanthropy can Fund for Impact is a new book by Clear Impact CEO, speaker, and author Adam Luecking. In the book, Luecking explores eight core strategies (in a light, entertaining format) that can help government and philanthropic funders:
- Set up world-class performance reporting systems in less time and with less burden.
- Make better decisions, through an equity lens, that are based on quality data.
- Empower their grantees and create productive funder/grantee relationships.
- Maximize the impact of their social investments.
- Improve public transparency and accountability.
Social Sector Hero launched on July 26th, 2022 at a Virtual Book Launch and Roundtable Discussion, hosted by:
- Adam Luecking, CEO, Clear Impact
- Dr. JaNay Queen Nazaire, Senior Advisor, PSG Equity
- Jason Green, Co-Founder, SkillSmart
Following the event, attendees will have the opportunity to download the book for free on the Clear Impact website, or order a physical copy on Amazon.
Below, you can access an exclusive sneak peek of Social Sector Hero‘s foreword by Dr. JaNay Queen Nazaire and the beginning of the first chapter.
Social Sector Hero
How Government and Philanthropy Can Fund for Impact
By Adam Luecking, with Kayleigh Weaver
Foreword by Dr. JaNay Queen Nazaire
Dedication
This book is dedicated to the Clear Impact staff, past and present, whose talent and passion for measurable improvements and superior technology have inspired Social Sector Heroes across the globe.
Praise for Social Sector Hero
Adam is one of the top leaders in the worldwide Results-Based Accountability (RBA) community. In this important book, Adam brings new insights into the crucial role that funders play in measurably improving quality of life in the communities they serve. Whether you are new to the concepts in this book or an experienced practitioner you will find useful advice and inspiring stories. I highly recommend it for both funders and their grantees.
– Mark Friedman, Director of the Fiscal Policy Studies Institute, creator of Results-Based Accountability, and author of Trying Hard is Not Good Enough
You will see yourself in this book; perhaps, even, in one or more of these Heroes’ journeys. Follow Adam’s advice for getting started on your own journey and just do it. His entertaining, sensible approach and unassuming way will give you the confidence you need to start looking at performance and accountability in a different way, and to push through any challenges that stand in the way of your work towards a Common Purpose.
– Marian Rueter Godwin, Director of Community Impact Services, United Way of Central Iowa
Social Sector Hero is a valuable manual, with easy-to-follow instructions on making the impact everyone in our sector dreams of making. As Adam states in Chapter Two, “No one entity can do this work in isolation.” It takes all of us, and Adam’s book helps light and direct a path forward. The book is a rich reminder that we can all be heroes.
– Kristin Hartley, Director of Organizational Impact, Child & Family Service, Hawai’i
Foreword: Beginning (or Continuing) Your Hero’s Journey
If you are reading these words, thank you. You have already taken the first step on your journey to become a Social Sector Hero — and we need more heroes in this space. The only way we’ll get them is if people like you commit to the necessary steps it takes to bring results, accountability and high performance to our work in the face of overwhelming challenges.
When I began my hero’s journey, I did not have the words to describe it, nor did I even realize it was a hero’s journey. I just knew I wanted to make a measurable difference in people’s lives across the world. Part of the journey has included time with Adam before and after he founded Clear Impact. Together, he and I worked on a project for the University of Maryland and the Annie E. Casey Foundation that convened public, philanthropic and nonprofit leaders working to achieve measurable outcomes for children and families across the state of Maryland.
Working with Adam, I began to see his unique approach to performance and accountability — and the difference it made for the communities and organizations he worked with. Once he started Clear Impact to help more communities, I joined him as a Senior Consultant, working with hundreds of organizations and communities in the U.S. and abroad to help them do their work better.
During those five years, I saw first-hand what it took to achieve and sustain large-scale results using the Clear Impact Scorecard and other tools. Working across numerous cities, counties, states and countries with Adam, I was continuously amazed by his ability to encourage our clients towards success despite the challenges they faced. I started to call him “Mr. Opportunity” because of his optimistic outlook. He has an uncanny talent for convincing people to do things and follow through on their commitments, no matter how big or small. This upbeat, dedicated attitude continues to be the archetypal element of a Social Sector Hero for me to this day, and I am thankful that this book offers the words, tools and insights that give meaning to the journey.
We can’t all be Adam and his “Mr. Opportunity” alter-ego, but thanks to this book, we can learn from his extensive career and the communities he’s worked with to achieve large-scale results. Often when I am facilitating a conversation about what it would take to shift population-level outcomes — such as growing businesses owned by people of color — there’s resistance and hesitation to tackle the challenges head-on. When people start to break down the elements and necessary work to achieve these results, they just don’t think it’s possible. But Adam has proven it’s possible and in this timely book, with its step-by-step instructions, Adam will teach you how to get from stuck to success on your results journey.
Before, during and after my time working with Adam, government and philanthropic funders were increasingly looking for nonprofits and organizations that had a results-driven mindset and were committed to high performance. This began in the fallout of the Great Recession, when we needed to do ‘more with less’, but it continued as our country’s intractable problems — racism, climate change, income inequality — were increasingly exposed as the existential threat to our collective wellbeing that they are.
I left Clear Impact for Living Cities, a funder collaborative of the world’s largest foundations and financial institutions. These were some of the largest private funders in the world — Ford Foundation, Gates Foundation, Wells Fargo, CitiBank — and my exposure to the challenges they faced in solving large-scale problems only confirmed the need for a dramatic shift across the social sector towards a results-oriented culture. Those that integrate a culture of inclusive high performance, based in humanity and multiple ways of learning, knowing and doing, will be rewarded; those that do not will struggle.
Ultimately, these funders are working toward the same goal: dramatic improvement in the conditions of wellbeing for people and communities. This book gives you the tools to get there — from securing alignment with partners to the necessary step of disaggregating data, from the need for qualitative storytelling to the importance of public accountability on your actions. As with most things, the lessons contained in these pages are easier said than done, but Adam’s accessible writing, clarity of approach, and helpful case studies will make the implementation much easier.
Our country has its share of overwhelming challenges these days. In my career, I’ve seen the awareness of these challenges grow, with more and more people across industries stepping up to take on the burden that comes with being a Social Sector Hero. Thanks to the book you are now reading, I’m confident that heroes like you will be equipped to tackle the challenges we need to overcome as a country to ensure we can all thrive.
Dr. JaNay Queen Nazaire
June 2022.
Introduction: The Social Sector Hero’s Journey
”You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” – Maya Angelou
Hello, and thank you for opening up this book today. My name is Adam Luecking, and I am the co-founder and CEO of Clear Impact — a performance management software and services provider with roots in the bustling Washington, D.C. metro area.
As I sit down to write, Clear Impact has just celebrated its fifteenth birthday, and throughout this rewarding journey, I have had the privilege of working closely with governments, nonprofits, and philanthropic funders in a dozen different countries around the world.
This book is for the people I call ‘Social Sector Heroes’: The funders, grantees and teams that work so hard to care for our children, families and communities. All of the Social Sector Heroes I’ve worked with over the years are fiercely passionate about what they do. And that makes sense — you have to be extraordinarily passionate to take on this extraordinarily challenging work. I’ve met hundreds of Social Sector Heroes in the last 15 years, and a lack of passion or goodwill is never an issue.
Social Sector Heroes bring passion, discipline, and accountability to their work. A Social Sector Hero is not perfect and they have justifiable fears and strong emotions around their work; they have good days and bad days. At some point, they may even have felt hopeless or resigned about their ability to make a difference, because Social Sector Heroes are human beings. But despite their fears and challenges, a Social Sector Hero ultimately decides to keep pushing forward. They use setbacks as a learning opportunity, rather than an excuse to give up. Finally, a Social Sector Hero understands that they don’t know everything, that it’s OK to ask for help, and there is no such thing as perfect. They are open-minded and they do not let perfectionism prevent them from taking action.
But many social and public sector organizations struggle to turn that passion into tangible results and impact.
According to the National Philanthropic Trust, philanthropic funders (and the individual donors that make that philanthropic work possible) are spending an ever-increasing amount on promoting public wellbeing. Just look at the numbers from a couple of years ago:
- Americans gave $471.44 billion in 2020, a 5.1 percent increase from 2019.
- Foundation giving in 2020 increased to $88.55 billion, a 19 percent increase from 2019.
Let’s look at government funding. According to USASpending.gov, the Federal Government spent $1.4 trillion on grants and fixed charges in FY2022, comprising 65.2 percent of its spending.
It’s a similar story when it comes to nonprofits. Currently, there are at least 1.4 million nonprofits in the United States. Combined, nonprofits (including charities and foundations) spend nearly $2 trillion annually. If you stacked $100 bills on top of each other, $2 trillion would reach 1,262 miles into space (and to put that into perspective, it only takes about 62 miles to leave Earth’s atmosphere and enter suborbital space). We are quite literally spending an exorbitant amount of money.
So what’s the problem? Why isn’t all that money — and the huge reserves of time, energy and goodwill — being poured into our society’s problems making a bigger difference?
Well, we’re spending billions and often trillions of dollars on the social good, and we have good data on these expenditures. But there is not an equal emphasis on providing data on the impact of that spending. Measuring the impact on wellbeing of philanthropic investments is much harder than analyzing spending (and the addition of a global pandemic in 2020 has complicated that even further).
The issue, as we’ve come to understand it, is that two key components are missing from the battle plan of most organizations: a Results-Based Accountability (RBA) strategy, and scalable, repeatable systems that allow teams to reliably deliver on their mission.
Now, when we first meet Social Sector Heroes, the mere mention of words like ‘Results-Based Accountability’ can introduce a mild sense of panic into the room. Either that, or people start settling in for a nap. But RBA is actually far more accessible than it sounds. Done correctly, it will not overwhelm you with data, nor is it another buzzword that sounds exciting but never delivers meaningful change.
I want to help your organization design a repeatable and scalable process to align your strategy and funding, analyze and improve your performance, establish productive dialogues with grantees, and — most importantly — improve the wellbeing of your customers and communities. To ensure flexibility, I have focused only on what I believe to be the most important steps and actions you’ll want to take.
You’ve probably heard it countless times before: increasingly restrained budgets make data-based decision-making and investing more important than ever. It’s never been more important to make the most effective budget, strategy, grant, and program implementation decisions possible, because nonprofits, government agencies, and public sector organizations find themselves in a pivotal moment in time. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many organizations and businesses into a state of emergency that continues beyond the publication date of this book. While it’s understandable that budgets have been slashed and funds are being funneled towards mitigation and recovery, it is also a time when demand for services is increasing and the industry is facing staff shortages — all of which creates an immense amount of pressure on the social sector and the people working in it.
And whether you call them objectives, goals, missions, outcomes, impacts or results, it’s the difference you make that ultimately matters — not the amount you spend or even the number of people you reach. You can reach a lot of people with a program and make very little difference if the program isn’t the appropriate solution to the problem.
The difference is the impact you get from your social investments: the measurable improvements in the organizations, communities, and individuals you aim to serve. Did you actually improve anyone’s life, and to what degree?
Your measurable impacts are the most important pieces of data you and your grantees could ever possess or share. These are things like, “Percentage of job training program participants who get and keep living-wage jobs six months after they completed the program.” Any organization with any mission can create a measure like this, and it doesn’t matter what kind of programming you provide. If you’re a funder, your grantees are probably going to be doing most of this measuring. Your role is to help standardize your grantmaking decisions using data, grantee impact reporting processes, and the actual measures used across similar funded programs.
RBA ideas can provide you and your team with clarity that will help you structure and scale your work for impact. These are ideas like, “establish a clear, common purpose,” or “use data to make decisions.” These ideas are so universal that they span sectors, industries, and all types of organizations. They are key business principles and are useful whether you’re seeking profit, impact, or both.
You don’t have to take my word for it, though. Throughout this book, you’re going to hear from sixteen Social Sector Heroes who have taken RBA and used it to absolutely transform their organization — and the lives of the people they serve.
I’m sure you will be able to relate to many of the stories in this book. Many of these organizations were facing inertia and inaction, usually stemming from (completely justifiable) fears — like the fear that data will be used to punish and blame. These fears tend to manifest as resistance to change, and end up being justifications for why previous efforts to introduce data and systems might not have worked:
- Too expensive
- Too time-consuming to set up
- Too time-consuming to manage
- Too burdensome on grantees to collect and report data
- Too much pushback from grantees
- Selecting measures is too difficult
- Data is too difficult to find
These objections are just a handful of the obstacles that can present themselves on the Social Sector Hero’s journey to impact. So whether you’re overwhelmed with data, wasting time with duplication of efforts, struggling to get buy-in, or have no clue how to measure your and your grantees’ impact, don’t worry. This book is designed to help you overcome the challenges preventing you from truly understanding and maximizing the impact of your donors’ dollars. I want to help you ensure your investments are generating results that improve the lives of your communities, by establishing a repeatable system that will make the difference between just trying hard and actually getting results.
When you can develop a clear and flexible system for results and accountability, you can be confident that you are making the best data-based decisions and investments possible.
Why “systems” and “flexibility”? They kind of seem like opposites, don’t they? Well, systems make efforts repeatable, measurable, and scalable. Flexibility allows diverse people, groups, and circumstances to adapt systems to their unique assets, insights, and perspectives without blowing up the bridge to the original mission. Creating flexible systems is difficult, but you really need both to make the biggest difference: you need the most people possible to buy into your new way of operating if you want to achieve your mission, but if you’re too rigid about the system, it will almost never work.
So how do you create flexibility? You focus more on the ends, rather than the means: more focus on what you want your staff and your grantees to accomplish, and less on the details and minutiae of how they accomplish it. This is what I want to help you figure out through the recommendations we will cover here.
This book cannot provide an exhaustive list of every single step you and your organization will need to follow. That part will be up to you, because every funder is different and will face different obstacles. But there are clear problem patterns I’ve come across that we will tackle: things like data paralysis, misalignment of efforts, inertia, and the inability to communicate your impact. In other words, I’ve focused on the biggest obstacles preventing your progress (the boulders instead of the pebbles, if you will).
There are also patterns among the most effective and most successful of the Social Sector Heroes that Clear Impact has worked with. That’s why a large part of this book will highlight stories from some of our most impactful clients and customers — those we consider to be exemplary Social Sector Heroes — and what we have learned working with them.
RBA and RBA training play an important role in the majority of stories I’ll share in this book. However, my advice is generally applicable to any framework. I will never demand that you use specific terminology exactly as I’ve laid it out. Instead, I’ll tell you what has worked for many others like you, provide evidence and guidance, and then encourage you to find the power within yourself and your organization to make it happen.
Our Heroes’ journeys are complex and sometimes span decades of effort that cannot be captured in a couple pages. Like me, they don’t want it to take decades for you to make a difference. Take what they offer and use it to accelerate your own progress.
The stories and recommendations laid out in this book will help you reduce the time it takes to create a world-class accountability and performance reporting system with your grantees. This system will…
- Add more value instead of burden
- Become repeatable and scalable by design
- Help you and your grantees create and communicate your measurable impacts.
I’ve worked to make the recommendations widely applicable to all kinds of readers, but detailed enough that you will be able to start implementing them right away.
If you’ve read my first book, or seen the title — The Holy Grail of Public Leadership and the Never Ending Quest for Measurable Impact — you’ll know I’m a huge fan of adventure and fantasy stories. That’s why I’ve structured this book as a kind of ‘social impact journey’ or hero’s adventure. Just as many fantasy stories involve a fellowship of characters on a quest through a mythical land, in search of treasure or transformation, so too is the Social Sector Hero’s journey. You will need the skills of every person on your team, you will need a clear mission, and you will need more than a little luck to get to your desired destination. You’ll face challenges throughout your hero’s journey and I believe the guidance this book will help you overcome those tough moments and ongoing puzzles.
Imagine it this way: You and your grantees are on a journey through a mountainous landscape. At the top of the tallest mountain is a treasure (social impact). Along the path, there are obstacles like falling boulders (staff turnover), a broken bridge across a rushing river (misaligned reporting systems), a field of flowers emitting a sleep-inducing toxin (overwhelming amounts of data), and off in the distance, one-eyed giants are battling on the mountainside (mismatched political and operational interests).
You’re completely stuck. You’ve approached the hazy field of flowers and have no idea how you’re going to get through without everyone collapsing in a snoring heap. Then, you spot something — the corner of an old tattered scroll sticking out of the dirt behind a small boulder. The scroll was written long ago by a wizard who accompanied countless groups on their journey to the top of the mountain. In the scroll, the wizard has drawn instructions on how to use materials from the local landscape to fashion a magical mask. This tool will allow your group to pass through the field unharmed and reach the next stage in your journey.
I’m not saying I’m a wizard, and my advice isn’t easy or a magic fix. But I hope that this book can be a little like the scroll in the story for you and your colleagues. I want to help you reach the top of the mountain as fast as possible…
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