This month’s Charity Village® Sustainability Series article is the fourth in a series that cover the practical aspects of embedding sustainability within your charity. You can view last month’s article here. As we move from the general logic of setting up such an initiative and putting together a core team along with goals, the issue of metrics looms large.

Monitoring and evaluation are probably the single most important issue when it comes to sustainability. There is the saying “what gets measured gets managed” and sustainability issues are often the ones that do not get measured (despite needing management). One cannot reach a goal without knowing where the goal post is, and charities typically have a lot to learn when it comes to robust monitoring systems for their core missions, let alone operations.

It’s worthwhile to dispel a few myths:

Monitoring is expensive: Ultimately, a monitoring system can be as expensive or inexpensive as you like. The key is good design that takes advantage of existing data gathering. For example, hydroelectric bills, water utility bills, toner cartridge invoices, paper purchases, staff lists, flight bookings, along with financial data are already gathered by an average organization. Additional social data can often be gathered with a bit of staff time and an online survey. In summary, with a small bit of work from many hands, considerable amounts of data can be gathered inexpensively.

Monitoring is a “nice to have”, not a “need to have”: I often hear people say, “sure it would be great to have improved monitoring, but we barely have enough resources to even ‘do’ something”. The thing is, monitoring IS doing something. Without monitoring data, you will not be able to prove your worth to your stakeholders, be it senior management or your supporters. Demonstrating change — from cost savings to employee satisfaction — is essential in a sustainability effort, and data from monitoring provides the evidence of improvement.

Monitoring can be done later when we have the resources: Monitoring often gets pushed down the list of things to do, when in fact it ought to be implemented right away. The reason for this again has to do with proving change. It is very important to establish baselines from which change towards sustainability can be measured. In other words, you have to know where you?re starting from (unsustainable) in order to determine if you?ve made it to where you want to go (sustainable). It?s critical to get a measurement as early as possible.

A Monitoring Plan

A useful element to put in place is a monitoring plan. This can be put together in a document, a spreadsheet, a database, or simply the back of a napkin! Below is an example of a simple, yet robust, monitoring plan.

Goal (includes target level)	Indicator	Method (How)	Who	When	Baseline (2005)	Current status (2010)	Target level	Details/Comment
By 2020, reduce greenhouse gas emissions from flights to 40% below 2005 levels.	Tons of GHGs from air travel (annual CO2e)	Distances: http://www.world-airport-codes.com/ GHGs: http://www.ghgprotocol.org/	Joe Smith (Actg)	Dec. each year	50 tonnes	53 tonnes	30 tonnes	Data obtained from accounting

  

With a rough monitoring plan in place, there are really four key steps to engaging in monitoring and evaluation (M&E): selecting indicators, gathering data, analyzing/evaluating data, and reporting the information.

1. Indicator Selection: Selecting indicators can be a daunting proposition given the array of options. While GRI (see case study) certainly presents a set of options, there are virtually an unlimited number of indicators. When selecting indicators it is important to consider a combination of factors: what data are available, what data would be ideal, and what data are useful for taking corrective action. The indicators you select need to reflect your goals, be affordable, easy to collect, and it also helps if they align with other indicators so that benchmarking is possible.

2. Data Gathering: Data gathering can be tedious, but it is ultimately the foundation of your success. Engaging key individuals is important, including those in human resources, administration/operations, as well as accounting (see Tips & Tricks). It is helpful to have one person assigned to centralize data into a spreadsheet or a database, which can be archived year after year to create an ongoing record.

3. Converting Data into Information: Once data are gathered, they need to be formatted and interpreted to create useful information. Data without meaning have little value. Statistical tests can often be valuable in this regard, helping to determine whether the trends are significant or not. It also helps to keep a record of methodologies (how data were gathered, stored, converted, manipulated, analyzed, etc.) for institutional memory.

4. Turning Information into Value: With the information in hand, it is important to present the information in a manner that can be used easily by various audiences. Presenting information in so-called “dashboards” with intuitive colour schemes (green = good, amber = questionable, red = problematic) is often helpful to quickly translate complex information into a digestible format. Keep it simple, considering your audience (e.g., internal / external? management / supporters?)

Overall, monitoring and evaluation is all about putting your money (or mission) where your mouth is. It is about walking the talk, and in this sense, charities are well served developing capacity to monitor. Not only is this a valuable skill to have in-house, but it often serves as a skill that can then be applied to external programmatic efforts (e.g., once you have measured social capital internally, you could measure the social capital of a community in which you are working). Building a baseline, tracking progress and ultimately being able to validate your efforts is a powerful combination that can have significant value to your organization.

CASE STUDY: Measuring Sustainability in For-profits

Sustainability matters to both the for-profit as well as the charitable world. While both sectors have a great deal to learn from one another, ironically the for-profit world has spent a considerable amount of time learning (and doing) organizational sustainability metrics.

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), represents one such effort. The GRI, a network-based organization, developed the world’s most widely used sustainability reporting framework. The monitoring and reporting framework is broadly based around economic, environmental and social indicators and provides a wealth of options for measurement that are then roughly comparable (data gathering methodologies are still somewhat variable). GRI has also produced an NGO sector supplement to assist NGOs with their own reporting. See Additional Resources below for more information.

Some excellent examples of corporate reports include: Vancity Credit Union, Timberland, Vodaphone and Hewlett-Packard. Key lessons learned from Corporate Reporting:

• Benchmarking through consistent indicators is helpful to give a sense of performance.
• Measure issues that are material to your mission.
• 3rd party verification improves the quality and integrity to provide assurance to stakeholders.
• Link monitoring, reporting and strategy.

 

Tips & Tricks: Where to find readily available data

 

Data Source	Description
Human Resources	HR can provide all sorts of data from staff turnover rates to diversity levels
Administration	Those who control office purchasing are KEY providers of data (e.g., paper, ink, bills, etc.)
Building Management	Often charities occupy an office within a larger building and management can often provide data on utilities and general building waste (which can be divided up on an area basis as a baseline)
Travel Agency	Travel agencies often have a database of flights and can perhaps even calculate distances and carbon for you
Staff/Supporters	Staff are a great data source, especially for capturing attitude and social data

 

Tips and Tricks: Monitoring Levels

Monitoring can occur at various levels including:

• Inputs: the resources put into an effort (e.g., hours, dollars, equipment, etc.)
• Actions: the actual efforts that go into the new practices (e..g, the meetings, phone calls, recommendations put forth to management, etc.)
• Outputs: the direct, short-term changes that result from the actions (e.g., a new double-sided printing policy)
• Outcomes: the derived, medium-term changes (e.g., the number of people adopting the new printing policy)
• Impacts: the ultimate, goal-related, long-term changes (e.g., reduction in paper and energy use)

 

Measuring at all different levels provides insights of different types. Inputs and actions can be measured quickly since they happen in the short term; outputs are valuable “accomplishments” but it is ultimately outcomes and impacts that relate to our sustainability goals and determine “success”.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Some additional sustainability resources related to sustainability monitoring and evaluation include:

• Bell, S. and Morse, S. (2008) Sustainability Indicators: measuring the immeasurable? 2nd Edition, Earthscan: Sterling, VA
• Global Reporting Initiative: The specifics are provided in the G3 guidelines, along with the NGO Sector supplement
• The UK?s Charity Commission has a useful website on environmental responsibility reporting.
• One of the most challenging M&E issues is measuring ?social capital?. There are various resources on this front, but Canada’s Policy Research Initiative provides a good overview in their 2005 publication: Measurement of Social Capital.

 

Alexis Morgan is a consultant who has spent much of his life working in or with charities ranging from small nonprofits, to large, international, non-governmental organizations. He has an MBA from the Schulich School of Business at York University, which focused on sustainability and nonprofit management. He has also spent over a decade actually doing sustainability with both charities and for-profit companies.