“When you open the door toward openness and transparency, a lot of people will follow you through.” – Kirsten Gillibrand

September 12th, 2022
By: Adam Luecking

When I was fresh out of college in 2003, I was in a community leadership program called Impact Silver Spring. As a participant, I identified a community need and created a project to address it. In East Silver Spring, Maryland — an area of high poverty — there were little to no opportunities for kids to participate in organized sports, especially those of immigrant families. With the help of a few friends, I created the Long Branch Athletic Association (LBAA), put together a board of directors, and started raising money.

As far as I remember, nobody else in the small nonprofit space was posting performance data online (remember what the internet looked like in 2003?). One of the things that I decided to do, given my background in Results-Based Accountability, was to create a Turn the Curve plan on three programmatic Performance Measures and post them on the project website. This transparency with data made us highly successful for a new, unproven nonprofit.

At the time, Steve Silverman was a county council member, a politician with big ambitions and a bigger heart, who helped engage local businesses to make sizable donations to the project. I believe that posting our data online really impressed the donors Steve was approaching. We ended up raising close to half a million dollars and winning nearly every grant we wrote over the five years that I was involved. We were also able to bring in community development block grant funding through the Montgomery County Government.

This experience has taught me that if people can quickly and easily see how you’re doing on key Indicators or Performance Measures — they’re more likely to reach out to support your impact journey. You’ll stay competitive with donors, whether they’re individuals, government agencies, businesses, or other funders. You’ll also help attract more funding and support for your partner’s programs.

There’s also data to back up these claims. According to a 2019 study, “Nonprofits that are more transparent and share things publicly, like audited financial reporting, goals, strategies, capabilities, and metrics demonstrating progress and results, received 53 percent more in contributions compared with organizations that are less transparent.” In this way, transparency can help funders and grantees create financial stability.

During my LBAA days, the process of trying to get performance data onto a public website was pretty arduous. I was constantly creating Excel spreadsheets, cutting and pasting, and coding them into the website. Then, a new cycle of data would come out, and I had to do it all over again. It was clunky. It didn’t look good. I wasn’t a graphic designer, so it was pretty rudimentary.

This experience heavily influenced the creation of our Clear Impact Scorecard software back in 2010. We didn’t want people to go through what I had to go through every month. After assisting many of our Scorecard funder clients to implement public data dashboards, many have been able to attract national recognition, more funding, and increased buy-in for training and capacity-building.

For example, Vermont is consistently ranked as one of the healthiest (and sometimes happiest) states in the nation. Scorecards help the Vermont Department of Health organize and share their State Health Improvement Plan 2019 – 2023 publicly on their website so that visitors can get an overview of strategies and planned interventions designed to impact health priorities. They also help the Department fulfill PHAB’s performance management system and public communications requirements (Scorecards are, of course, merely one variable in Vermont’s equation for success).

On the other side of the funding fence is SisterWeb, a small community nonprofit based in San Francisco. SisterWeb consists of a network of culturally harmonious Doulas and birth workers belonging to and serving Black, Pacific Islander, and Latinx communities. Motivated by attracting more funding from existing and new funders, Marna Armstead (SisterWeb Executive Director) began to read up on the benefits of sharing data. Now, SisterWeb regularly distributes data reports to each of its programs and solicits feedback on what might be missing from their data stories. Data is made highly visible, always adhering to ethical guidelines and striking a balance between numbers and narrative. This has contributed to a feeling that the organization cares for its staff and Doulas. As of 2020, 85 percent of Doulas felt that SisterWeb cared about helping them achieve their professional goals, and they continue to work on Turning the Curve.

(You can learn more about the Vermont and SisterWeb stories in Social Sector Hero.)

So, how exactly do you go about sharing data effectively? How do you build transparency that doesn’t leave you vulnerable and earns you all the great outcomes? The best way to share your data publicly is to make a dedicated page on your website. Many of our clients call that particular page “Our Impact.” You can check out SisterWeb’s impact page here for an example. On your impact page, you can present your data and Turn the Curve Plans for improvement. Providing contextual information with the data will be key, especially if the numbers don’t currently reflect your aspirations. Use the opportunity to present your plans for improvement. People will appreciate your honesty.

You could certainly do all your performance management, reporting, and sharing manually. Lots of organizations do that. I certainly had success with it when I did fundraising for LBAA 20 years ago. But it’s not 2003 anymore. There are so many software systems and tools available. When catered to your needs, technology can expedite and automate the more mundane parts of the work so that you can focus more on what matters most — creating community impact.

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If you’re interested in learning more about how to effectively share your data publicly, practice transparency to increase your funding and impact, learn from real success stories, and find a data reporting technology solution that works for you, check out chapter nine in my book Social Sector Hero – How Government and Philanthropy Can Fund for Impact.

Thank you for reading!