Let’s start this article off with clearing up a common misconception – impact is not the same as return on investment (ROI). Most nonprofits combine their financials and a few heartwarming stories from the field as a way to acknowledge their impact. But does it cover all grounds of social impact on all constituents? Do we need more quantitative data or some qualitative information? How do we derive the complete story? This year, one of my pro-bono clients helped me to explore the answer. In this article, I want to share my general approach and high-level key lessons I learned when I worked with a small shop to design their impact metrics.
In September 2020, I joined a youth development and mentoring organization (keeping all names anonymous) in the DC area of the US. They support approximately 200+ youths at the age of 18-25. As a relatively new organization, they wanted to establish processes and tools to collect data and measure their future impact. Their five dedicated staff’s commitment to learning whatever it takes to support their mission was inspiring to me as an outside advisor. Our engagement’s scope was to take stock of what data collection tools they had in place, understand their mission and strategic plan, and create metrics that they could use year-over-year to talk about their impact. Sounds easy, right? Nope! Sounds fun? Absolutely!
My overall approach
As I started learning more about the organization, mission, strategic plan, and other elements that speak to their story, I began to realize that, in general, there were two key questions I needed to answer to design an approach:
- Can the organization adapt to a sustainable data collection process?
- How to decide the starting point of measurement?
The answer to the first question was yes – the team was flexible and open to adapting their practices. Like any reasonably new organization, the tools and technology had been picked with deliberate intention and explored for efficient use, meaning the team was ready to learn and adapt as needed. That being said, I wanted to leverage their strengths and not overwhelm them with too much information at once.
Next was the bigger question – the starting point of measurement. This question was crucial. In my opinion, defining impact is way more challenging than measuring impact. There were three places where I could start thinking about measurement:
- Mission and Values: Establishing metrics to measure their progress towards their mission in the long-term.
- Strategic Plan: Establishing metrics to measure progress towards the goals and overall program implementation.
- Individual Programs: Establishing metrics to measure individual programs’ progress, capacity, and day-to-day numbers.
With the scope of the engagement in mind, we decided to pick mission as the starting place to quantify and leverage when speaking about impact.
Snapshot of the areas for key metrics
Their team and I took the mission statement and divided it into two components: “Partner of choice for mentors” and “Partner of choice for mentees”.
Measuring Partner of choice for mentors
The following areas were selected for data collection and formulae:
- Mentor onboarding
- Mentor utilization
- Mentor goal achievement score
- Mentor satisfaction score
- Mentor retention
Measuring Partner of choice for mentees
The following areas were selected for data collection and formulae:
- Mentee onboarding
- Mentee goal achievement score
- Mentee satisfaction score
- Mentee professional development score
Key lessons learned
Here are the five lessons to remember when creating impact metrics in your organization:
- Build a consensus around where you want to start. Your starting place is the one that speaks most about your impact.
- Understand the current data collection tools you have. Most metrics you design may not have data already. Define where and how you could collect the data.
- Establish the adaptability of your team when designing such vital metrics. Any new data collection and measurement plan should include an outline of implementation that manages any resistance and hesitance on the team members’ part.
- Establish the time frames of when the refreshes would happen on the data collected for the selected metrics.
- Establish a mechanism of who communicates the result of these impact metrics and how you share it with your broader audience.
Additional subject areas
Here are some additional areas you can explore if you are curious to learn more about impact measurement:
- Asking effective questions from your data
- Designing key metrics from data
- Building effective dashboards
- Measuring social impact (extensive programs offered on skill development platforms)
- Building inclusive metrics and evaluation methods to gauge if the research questions tracked are equitable
Know that this exercise of building impact metrics is not an end-all, be-all task. Our work’s impact is directly affected by the complexities and challenges of the world in which we live. As our work expands, so should we expand how define that impact with inclusivity.
Meenakshi (Meena) Das (she/her/hers) is a fundraising analytics and research specialist. She specializes in designing survey-based research tools and analyzing engagement. Meena appreciates spending her time outside work as a mentor to immigrant women and as a pro bono research advisor to small shops. Her two recent favorite projects are working on making data-based research tools more DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) compliant and designing the second season of her podcast “Being and Unbeing an Immigrant” where she wants to bring together the families of immigrants left behind in the home country. Connect with Meena on LinkedIn.
