21 February 2008

Full article from Giving Insights Winter 2008 edition on Measuring up: top tips

There has been a great deal of discussion about measuring and managing outcomes over the last few years in the charitable sector. But many charities find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place—it seems obvious that it is important to know how effective your work is, but it can also seem that the work charities do is so complex that it can be almost impossible to measure your results.

At New Philanthropy Capital, we believe that it is both essential, and possible, to measure your results. It’s essential because you cannot effectively manage, or fund, your work unless you know the results it delivers. And it’s possible. In fact, we would argue that you already know much more than you think you do—it’s just that it can be much harder to write down what you and your staff hold in your heads already.

So here are our top tips for starting to measure your results:

• Focus on what you know—your passion, and your staff’s passion, comes from seeing the impact that your work can have first hand. When thinking about measuring outcomes, try to make sure that this direct perspective isn’t lost—don’t let it become abstract and too theoretical.

• Start with a theory of change—think about why your organisation is really there (the need it responds to) and what it wants to change (people’s lives, communities, policy). Then work out how that change takes place, and what you can measure along the way. The combination of these elements is sometimes called a theory of change.

• Keep asking “So what?”—you might deliver 1,000 training sessions, but so what? How many of them result in changes in the people’s lives who have been trained? You might give advice to 1,000 people over the phone, but so what? How many of them were able to take action as a result of that advice?

• Keep it simple—it is much better to measure one or two aspects of your results that are at the core of your work and do it well, than to try to measure lots of things and struggle to do so. For example, a charity helping older people to volunteer will do better to measure improvements in its volunteers wellbeing and health than to try to measure the impact on communities of all of the work that the volunteers do.

• Be flexible—all evidence can be useful, so don’t think that you can only use hard, quantitative data and must ignore what seems like softer, more qualitative information. Feedback from users, beneficiaries and other funders can be just as useful as statistics. In fact, we try to keep to the mantra “No numbers without stories; no stories without numbers.”

• If you don’t know, ask—it might seem obvious, but you can’t measure the impact of your work on people unless you ask them. If you have a database of all the people who have used your services, why not contact them all with a brief survey about the impact your work’s had on them? If you want to know about the longer-term results your work creates, you’ll have to follow up some time after you deliver your services.

• Keep your audience in mind—when measuring your results, consider who the information is for. Is it for you—to manage your organisation? Is it for funders—to communicate the results that funding can achieve? Is it for your wider stakeholders—including the people whose lives your work changes? We would argue that you should bear in mind all three audiences, as your results are important to them all.

• Engage your staff—starting to measure results is going to mean that your staff have to add to their work. So it’s important that you are clear about why you are asking them to measure—what the benefits of having this information will be. And it’s important that you involve them in deciding what to measure—if you focus on the important things, your staff will find that measuring results actually helps them as it demonstrates the difference they are making.
  
  
• Don’t forget about systems—with all the data you might start to collect, you will probably need to consider the systems you’ll need to collect, store and analyse it. This might mean a simple spreadsheet, a new database, or an online system.

• Recognise that this is an investment—it will take time, hard work and money to get to the point where you can measure your outcomes well. It may take some time before you start to produce really useful data. But this is an investment. If you do it well, it will make your organisation stronger—better able to manage your resources effectively, to attract funding on the basis of your impact and to communicate the role your organisation plays to all of your stakeholders, including the people whose lives you aim to change.
  

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