By: Adam Luecking July 26th, 2022 Spending more time and energy on achieving alignment is one of the most important things any organization can do to increase efficiency and impact. Alignment ensures that everything you do, individually and as a group, serves your organizational purpose and destiny. More specifically, alignment involves assigning appropriate roles [...]
Long story short, there are two groups of performance measures your organization needs to ensure you are advancing your mission in an effective and timely manner: Performance measures for management, administrative units, and internal functions Performance measures that quantify the quality and impact of your community-facing services (aka, program performance measures) It is also [...]
“High-performance organization” is a moniker most organizations—private, public, or nonprofit—would love to earn. And yet who can say what “high performance” really means for mission-based nonprofits? More important, how do executives, boards, and funders get there from here? The Leap Ambassadors Community, a network of more than 50 nonprofit executives, has spent the past year [...]
The Short Answer Indicators are about whole populations. Performance measures are about client populations. Indicators are usually about peoples' lives, whether or not they receive any service. Performance measures are usually about people who receive service. Indicators are proxies for the well-being of whole populations, and necessarily matters of approximation and compromise. Performance measures are about a known group [...]
The Short Answer All performance measures (that have ever existed for any program in the history of the universe) fall into one of four categories, derived from the intersection of quantity and quality vs. effort and effect. QUANTITY QUALITY EFFORT What did we do? How much service did we deliver? How well did we do [...]
The Short Answer (1) There are many classification schemes or typologies for performance measures that have been used over the years. The 4 quadrant typology is a new way to account for all the different kinds of performance measures. And it can be used to diagnose other classification schemes for performance measures. (2) Think [...]
The Short Answer 1. The 4 Quadrant method and logic model methods can be seen as complementary, not contradictory, approaches. 2. The 4 Quadrant model goes directly to the identification of performance measures, without a lot of preliminaries: What do we do? (quantity of effort = # clients served, # activities performed) (= logic model outputs). [...]
Check out the updated version of this page here! The Short Answer 1. For each administrative activity, identify the measures (in the upper right quadrant) that describe how well that activity is performed. These usually have to do with timeliness (e.g. % of invoices paid in less than 30 days, average time to fill a [...]
Check out the updated version of this page here!
The Short Answer 1. Identify the measures for which you currently have data. 2. Choose the most important using a forced choice process, asking: "If you had to talk about your program with just one of these circled measures, which one would it be?" 3. Identify your data development agenda using a forced choice [...]
