Management IS Measurement

Using Metrics to Measure NonProfit Success

How are we any good?

• As an organization and as a group of organizations?

Idea of Impacts

• useless. causality hard to prove!
• Be effective. We can measure it!
• but how do you measure effectiveness?

Theory of Change:

• figure our 1-3 sentences describing the change we want!
• pick something doable!

1 Why can we do this? How can we do this! 2 What activities can be done? Say them. 3 What IT infrastructure do we need?

• all employess can report back on a daily basis on what they did towards the goal
• scrum... seems like that!

Map it to funders and ecosystem!

Works best at small scale. or many interlocking small projects!

Sell theory to public and funders (responsibility to public) do the job!

Example: anti-alcohol org got nasty alco-pop off market by telling parents about it, then parents pressured FDA

Individual Orgs Can't do it, but a constelation of groups can!

Problem: Metrics can't always show when a tipping point will be hit!

• need more experimental philanthropy to try wacky ideas.

Best Funders

• inside of organizations to standardize metrics.
• that way, they can get orgs to work together more effectively.
• ex. certain best practices in agriculture, if all farmers follow them and yield goes up, then Best Practices are justified.

Can then get corps to behave better ("better yield over long time if you treat farmers better!") If you have data!

Getting the wrong members

• have to have your goals right!
• otherwise, this happens...
• ex. doing both animal rights and indiginrous rights, and this being incompatible

Genetic Theories

• help organizations to define goals to funders

"center of what works"

• but can lead to unorthodox projects being marginalized.