August 8th, 2022
By: Adam Luecking

Funders – think about all the important activities you and your grantees engage in on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. Whether it’s project evaluation, budgeting, program implementation, research, data collection, data analysis, administrative functions, strategy development, meetings, reporting, operational processes, emails, staff development… the list goes on and on. You could probably fill up a book if you sat there and thought about it long enough. Maybe several books. (I recently filled up a 200-page book myself talking about some of these things).

It’s enough to make your head spin. This is why it is crucial that government agencies, philanthropic funders, and nonprofits actively attempt to do away with organizational “side-quests” — superfluous activities or details that distract them from the main mission at hand.

Side quests are often well-meaning actions or projects that don’t produce enough value to justify their implementation. Avoiding side-quests helps any organization focus on what matters most, like creating a measurable impact for their constituents, clients, customers, or communities (as swiftly and efficiently as possible).

In my experience, the biggest side-quest time-wasters involve:

  1. Tracking or requiring grantees to track too many performance measures
  2. Focusing on low-value performance measures that don’t speak to the programmatic impact on clients or communities.

So, how do you avoid side quests and ensure that your performance measures are meaningful and useful? If you keep the following two rules in mind, you’ll be less likely to veer off course too often:

  1. To maintain alignment, every funded partner should report on a maximum of five metrics. The metrics should primarily speak to the role that the organization plays in achieving your Common Purpose. Why only five? Exercising restraint will ensure urgency and accelerate progress towards your social impact destiny.
  2. The most important performance measures you and your partners should focus on answer one simple question: Is anyone better off as a result of your service? Other kinds of measures — like the number of clients a program serves or the number of program pamphlets handed out — are important, but they are NOT impact measures.

So…how do you develop effective performance measures that generate the most value and keep you focused?

The Results-Based Accountability framework presents three questions any program can ask to design performance measures. I will present the three questions below and utilize a fictional after-school reading program to serve as an example:

1. How much did we do?

  • # program participants (# of total children enrolled in the ABC Afterschool Reading Program during the 2021/2022 school year)
  • # program actions (# of successful reading sessions held)
  • # goods distributed (# of informational brochures distributed to parents)

2. How well did we do it? 

  • program attendance rate (average attendance rate for each reading session)
  • customer satisfaction (average % of kids who said they had fun at the conclusion of each guided reading session)
  • percent of staff with training/certification (% of program coordinators with formal teaching or early childhood development credentials)

3. Is anyone or anything better off?

  • #/% of satisfied customers (% of parents who reported that their child has increased interest in reading after program completion)
  • #/% of improved customers after X months (% of children who improved reading scores after X months)
  • Cost/Benefit Ratio (ratio of average $ spent per child participant compared to % of children with improved reading scores after X months)

In the performance measure development process, make sure you ask each of your funded partners to: create at least one measure that speaks to the number served (this is still important – it’s just not the most important type). The most important type of performance measure, however, should speak to whether people are better off as a direct result of the program or service being implemented. These types of measures quantify changes (or lack thereof) in attitudes, behavior, skills, knowledge, or life circumstances for service recipients.

Minimizing your performance measures is just one way to avoid side-quests on your mission to social impact. If you’re interested in learning more, I dive more deeply into the topic of organizational side-quests and how to avoid them in my recent book, Social Sector Hero: How Government and Philanthropy Can Fund for Impact.

At the end of the day, if you give yourself too much to do and jump from ‘quest’ to ‘quest’, you’ll have less time and resources to spend on each individual project. You’ll find that some projects may be abandoned entirely, resulting in frustration and wasted resources. On the other hand, when you minimize the number of side-quests you embark on, you’ll be able to focus on the most important journey of all — achieving a measurable positive impact in your community.