How do you know if you are making progress toward mission fulfillment? In short, it depends on your ability to implement the right metrics to track outcomes. You’ve likely heard the phrase “measure what matters.” Well, what could matter more than your organization’s ability to fulfill its mission?
Making an impact takes time. Fulfilling your mission isn’t easy. I like to tell people that if it was easy, everyone would do it. A great place to start is with your strategic plan. Your organization’s strategic plan was informed by a cross-section of stakeholders and approved by the board of trustees. Your strategic plan is, in its simplest form, how you are going to work toward mission fulfillment over a set number of years. Strategic plans tend to have three to seven year lifecycles, though they are trending much shorter in recent years. Each objective set out in your strategic plan should have key performance indicators (KPIs) that help you chart your progress. To effectively establish KPIs, it is essential to know what progress, and ultimately success, will look like.
A word of caution on KPIs – they are not vanity metrics. Vanity metrics exist to offer impressive numbers but do not translate to outcomes. For example, social media can be a vanity metric, if not evaluated properly. Yes, your number of followers can be an important datapoint, but how were those followers obtained? Did you reply to an ad that promised 10,000 followers by clicking a link then, seemingly overnight, your list of followers grew? Those aren’t people who are engaged with your mission, those are bots. Those followers are not going to meaningfully engage with your organization’s content, they are going to artificially inflate the number of people you think are connected to you. While your leadership may love to see that your followers grew by 1000% in the last month, they are not going to see any measurable business outcomes as a result of that growth. A better metric, if social media is your priority, is evaluating content engagement. How many people comment or share what you post? Content engagement expands reach and organically grows your followers. That is a metric that matters.
Back in October, I shared my thoughts on how careers in construction can help break the cycle of poverty in communities. That’s a tall order when it comes to measurable KPIs. How would an organization know if it was making a difference, if this were its mission? I’d start by breaking the goal down into measurable segments. First, select a test area to evaluate impact. Then measure the number of people who enroll in a construction training program. Next, track job placement and retention in those roles over a period of time. Programs like this require a longitudinal study to evaluate impact on poverty cycles, but long-term, the number of residents can be measured and compared to individuals living below the poverty line. Changes need to be tracked over time. Time is a key factor to demonstrate mission fulfillment in this particular example. What if you needed more immediate data? Program growth, job placement, and employee retention are subcategories that can evaluate progress along the way and be indicators that relate to the overall goal of helping people grow out of poverty.
As a fundraiser, I am always having conversations with donors about their goals. From an operational leadership perspective, I am also thinking about KPIs that would allow the donor to know if we helped them achieve their goals. As a leader, I know I can’t bog my staff down in hundreds of different KPIs. Every nonprofit has limited resources. But if I am talking with a donor about supporting an established strategic initiative, I will likely already have built the metrics necessary to measure success. Explaining those KPIs to the donor is part of the cultivation process and, more often than not, a key decision-making factor that helps my organization stand out. Lots of nonprofit organizations demonstrate success through qualitative outcomes, like testimonials. Offering quantifiable points of measurement is a differentiator. Both, used in combination, allow you to truly know and show that you are making a difference.
