Who Defines Impact?

Who Defines Impact?

We've all heard the message that donors get involved to make a difference, and that we need to be able to tell them what impact our organizations are making. But recently, I’ve had several conversations with clients that confirmed a fear of mine when people in the nonprofit sector hear the word impact, they think judgment.

Somewhere in the process of trying to describe the difference we are making, we’ve started applying other people's definitions of success to our work. In doing that we have unnecessarily declared ourselves failures, and missed an opportunity to develop organizational self-awareness.

Let me give you an example. A few years ago I was working with a client who provides a variety of human services programs in a large, inner-city area. One of their programs provided transitional housing to homeless families. As I reviewed their program information before I met with staff, I noticed that they described their program goal this way: to move families from homelessness to permanent housing within 12 months. So, when I met with the program director I asked, How successful have you been in meeting that goal?Her answer was, We’ve never done it. 

This is exactly the point where the undermining can begin. See, that program goal had nothing to do with what the organization or the people running the program believed to be true about helping the people they serve. That program goal was borrowed from a Federal housing program model. At the time it was selected, it sounded like a good goal and it is for another organization. But for this client, that definition of success made them feel like a failure. 

Thankfully, they were willing to dig deeper. Over the next few months, we began to discuss what success meant to the people involved in the organization and the families they serve. We implemented performance metrics that didn’t have to do with how fast a family blew through their program. Instead the metrics focused on how connected, loved, stable, and equipped the people they served were becoming. Those metrics reflected the core values of the organization and the deeply held convictions staff shared about how to effectively help people.

The performance measurement system they built wasn’t a report card declaring ,passing, or failing judgment on the organization. They built a feedback system so they could learn more about what was actually happening in their programs and in the lives of the people served.  They used what they learned to make adjustments to strengthen programs and donor communications.

And what they learned was phenomenal. They were serving a homeless population, single parents with children, not served well in their area. They were able to keep families together, even working with child services to ensure children and parents stayed together. They were able to intervene with services and housing the first time a family experienced homelessness, before it became a chronic problem. The average stay in their housing was closer to 24 months than 12.  This was not because the organization was bad at its work, but because people needed that extra time to build community, something this organization does beautifully. Finally, the organization was able to realize the unique role it was serving, define success on its terms, and confidently communicate what they were doing well. That is impact.

The pressure to define impact as efficiency is prevalent in the field today. We are constantly told to do more with less and do it faster.  We can jump through every evaluation hoop a funder sets for us and never really see the big picture. We don’t have to accept that. 

Measuring impact is not about perfection, it is about building an internal process that pays attention to key aspects of your organization’s work. Without that information, we will all be tempted to define success using someone else’s words, values or context.  Authenticity matters when communicating impact--if we don't know what we do well, how can we engage people in our mission?  If we never take the time to examine what we do well and what we may need to change, we run the risk of moving away from our mission, relying on needs-based pleas to funders and donors and burning out staff trying to meet some other organization's goals. 

The work we do isn’t easy to quantify and measure. It is messy, constantly changing and very long-term. Sometimes solving the problem can’t be the goal. Most of the time, being there to walk out whatever life circumstance led someone to seek help is a better goal. 

And yes, you can measure messy, unstable and long-term stuff. Don’t start with outside voices and benchmarks, start by asking the people who come to work every day to make your mission happen, "How do you define success?" Ask the people you serve what has made the biggest difference for them. Ask questions about why you do your work the way you do. You may learn that some things need to change, but in the process you’ll have galvanized the people who care the most and want to see your work succeed.