5 Steps to Improving Your Organizational Alignment

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 [...]

The Basics of Identifying Performance Measures for Your Organization

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 [...]

How to Achieve the Performance Imperative with Results-Based Accountability

“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 [...]

Redefining the Role of United Ways With Results Based Accountability and Asset Based Community Development

By H. Daniels Duncan, Senior Vice President, United Way of Tucson and Southern Arizona To download the complete whitepaper click here. "Our United Way system is embarking on a bold journey to transform communities across the country(and now the world)by setting goals that are focused on education, income and health; the building blocks of a [...]

2.3 How do we get people to understand the difference between indicators and performance measures?

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 [...]

3.7 How do we identify performance measures for programs or services?

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 [...]

3.8 What are the differences between the 4 quadrants of performance measures?

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 [...]

3.9 What is the difference between 4 Quadrant performance measures and logic model performance measures?

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). [...]

3.10 How do we identify performance measures for administrative functions like personnel, budgeting, etc.?

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 [...]