It takes more than an admirable mission statement to make a difference. So how can you tell the difference between an effective nonprofit and one that struggles to have real impact? Whether you’re giving to charitable groups, serving on a board, or working in the nonprofit world, this is an important question to answer.
As donors, we want to ensure our charitable dollars are supporting effective work because good intentions only get you so far. Board members, too, must have the knowledge to hold nonprofit leaders to account. And those working for nonprofits need to know not only which groups are delivering the results they care about but how their role can help the organization more effectively advance its mission.
In this episode of Giving Ventures, Leah Kral joins Peter for an insightful discussion of what nonprofit success looks like. Leah is Senior Director of Strategy and Innovation at the Mercatus Center and quite literally wrote the book on nonprofit success.
Measuring Success
Rather than relying on the gut feeling that an organization is going in the right direction, Leah says we have to get over our fear of metrics and begin measuring impact. Of course, measurement is always accompanied by pitfalls. “We can measure the wrong thing. We can measure the easy thing. With bad metrics, we can overemphasize short-term goals at the expense of long-term outcomes,” Leah notes.
If we are guided too much by what we measure, “we can incentivize the wrong thing or create unintended consequences.” And on the flipside, “we can just collect data that doesn’t guide action. Just kind of a bureaucratic box-checking exercise.” Yet good measurement remains important.
To measure well, we must be clear about the purpose of our metrics and thoughtful about how we know when our efforts are working. Website clicks and social media hits tell us something, but they aren’t everything. The numbers an organization collects—and the way those numbers influence decision-making—should be thought through with the aim of learning whether the group’s work is accomplishing what it’s supposed to.
Innovation for Social Change
Knowing how well a nonprofit is delivering results is only the first step. Regardless of how effective a group is today, our hope should always be to make it more effective tomorrow. The key, Leah says, is innovation.
Innovating can but doesn’t have to mean sweeping change. An organization that continually strives to make its processes more efficient and its programs more effective little by little can change the world.
Leah points out that a willingness to take some risks and experiment—with the expectation that failures will come—is crucial to remaining innovative. Alcoholics Anonymous, she points out, didn’t become the well-known and effective recovery program we know today overnight. “Time, experimentation, and many failures [were necessary] for them to ultimately discover their famous twelve-step model or even realize that members should be anonymous,” Leah discovered in her research into the history of the group.
Whether you are supporting nonprofit groups with your charitable dollars or lending your talents to the nonprofit scene on a board, in leadership, or on the ground, Leah offers an exhortation to be on the lookout for an innovative culture and a thoughtful approach to measuring success. No matter your role, you can help groups deliver on their intentions by asking the right questions, tolerating a little experimentation, and relentlessly pursuing continued learning and growth.
To learn more how a nonprofit can punch above its weight, check out Leah’s book, Innovation for Social Change: How Wildly Successful Nonprofits Inspire and Deliver Results. You can listen to the entire episode with the player above, click the iTunes or Spotify icons at the top, or find it wherever you get your podcasts.
