Want to make a difference? DON’T keep changing what you track! 

It doesn’t matter if you’re giving grants or receiving them, one sure-fire way to hinder your ability to make an impact with the work you do is by changing the measures you include in your reports. 

You might be saying, “Well our work is always changing so what we measure should change too.”  You couldn’t be further from the truth.  Sure, it’s important to not get stuck in a rut of “this is what we always do” but that applies to your strategies and actions, NOT to the measurements used to help you make decisions about those strategies and actions. 

Let me explain using a traditional for-profit business.  ABC Widgets has a unique, proprietary process for cleaning and polishing forged mechanical parts.  To gauge how their business is doing, they track the following measures in three areas of their operation every month: 

Sales 

• Number of customers 
• Average customer sale 
• Percent repeat business year-over-year 

Production 

• Number of part batches 
• Average batch completion time  
• Percent of time our production line is down for maintenance 

Quality Assurance 

• Number of batches needing a second pass 
• Percent of batch outside of acceptable parameters 

In all likelihood, their list of measures probably includes a lot more than is listed here, but these are the measures that are MOST important to the health of their business.  The other measures are either specific to one division, one process, or one work center.  By looking at THESE headline measures over time, they will have a great foundation to see when something is out of the ordinary.  When a trend stands out for the better or worse, it helps the leadership team narrow down their questions to get to the root cause of the change.  If it’s for the better, it helps to isolate why so they can continue to replicate that part of the process.  If it’s detrimental, it helps to pinpoint where things may need to be fixed. 

If the leadership team was always changing what measures they looked at, they would never be able to see a potential benefit or problem since there would likely be no context or historical evidence.  Always changing what you measure never allows you to get to the root cause of outlying data because you never see any outlying data. 

So, what does this look like for a non-profit? 

In the context of Results-Based Accountability and Turn The Curve Thinking, your measures can be grouped into three areas as well:  

What We Do

These are your normal count measures that pretty much everyone already tracks. Now, you’re just giving these measures some structure to tell a story. Examples include:

• Number of clients served 
• Days of instruction 
• Hours of therapy 

How Well We Do It

These measures look at the quality of the services you deliver.  You can also use client satisfaction surveys for additional or replacement measures. Examples include:

• Client / staff ratio 
• Attendance rate 
• % of staff current on continuing education 

Is Anyone Better Off?

Yes, these may be the hardest measures to get data for, but they are the reason your organization exists.  If you can’t prove your work, you’re doing a disservice to the community and your donors. Examples include:

• % of clients who improved after 6 months 
• Graduation rate 
• % of students with improved behavior 

By only looking at your MOST IMPORTANT measures, and NEVER CHANGING what you measure, you’ll have a much better foundation to notice changes in the work you are doing.  As with the examples for ABC Widgets, if you always change what you track, you’ll never see the outlying data.  You could miss a massive improvement and never know why, or even worse, you could potentially be spending your efforts and resources on things that are actually detrimental to the impact you want to make – and never know it. 

Here’s the impact on your bottom line. The work you do is easier to report on when you can tell a consistent story. Ever-changing measures mean an ever-changing story that eats up your marketing resources while continuously changing your messaging.  Not only will you be able to have a better insight into the work you do, your staff, board members, and donors will appreciate the consistency 

These are just a few examples of measures you can use. If you want to see more, check out our blog post about other examples of performance measures you can use for your program or service. 

About the Author:

Marco began his RBA journey as a user of Clear Impact Scorecard in 2015 while working at a local United Way. His work there helped align over 150 agencies in 11 different community collaboratives in the areas of Healthy Living, Middle School Progress, Early Childhood Education, and Emergency Financial Assistance. He has helped design more efficient processes for agencies to be better stewards of their funds allowing their efforts to turn curves faster and with more impact than the way they had always been doing things.

For help implementing the tips in this blog, you can contact Marco at mcuevas@clearimpact.com.