Can nonprofits design evaluation and metrics that get in the way of innovation?
Can nonprofits design evaluation and metrics that get in the way of innovation?
Yes. When designed poorly, they can waste our time and even be counterproductive.
But when a metrics and evaluation approach is designed as a meaningful feedback loop, it can help us answer questions like:
💡 How do we know if what we are doing is working?
💡 Did we achieve our intended outcomes? How did our beneficiaries fare?
💡 Processes – how did we do?
💡 Structures – how well did we organize our efforts?
💡 Comparison of approaches – which worked best?
💡 What are we learning from our experiments?
Evaluation and metrics, done right, are highly valuable. They can help us identify problems, such as cutting waste or lukewarm programs, as well as opportunities, like discovering better tactics and strategies for continuous improvement.
Take the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, which has a strategic effort for infection prevention. They began to closely track how many patients developed infections after surgery and assess how the infections were developing. The effort helped them identify ways to reduce the number of infections by half.*
Discovery is a process of asking questions, testing, learning, adjusting, and iterating.
Better information might help prevent overly optimistic thinking about something that isn’t working. We might have barn sized blind spots. We might have status quo bias. I've seen it. Evidence and information can help us overcome these common and very human biases, and provide far better service to our nonprofit's clients and beneficiaries.
For more on how to lead teams through designing metrics and evaluation that support innovation, see Innovation for Social Change, chapter 7: Evaluating, Learning, and Adjusting.
* R. Abelson, “Managing Outcomes Helps a Children's Hospital Climb in Renown,” New York Times, September 15, 2007.
In case you missed it:
Delighted and honored that Innovation for Social Change is reviewed in the latest Voluntary Sector Review and the Journal of Nonprofit Education and Leadership❤️ With gratitude to Dr. Kara Lawrence and Dr. Salvatore Alaimo.
Last week I had the privilege to speak about nonprofit innovation with the 2024 Fellows of the Stand Together Foundation. We talked about lessons from Greyston Bakery, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, the leadership of the American civil rights movement, The Nonprofit Hive, and more. With gratitude to Program Manager Sally Hoffmann for the gracious invitation.
This! I received this photo from my hometown library. 💖 Thank you, Wayne County Public Library - such an important, formative place to me as a young girl hungry for learning, and to so many others.
It was an honor to be interviewed by the Philanthropy Roundtable! "Failing to empower people on the front lines, the ones doing the work, will be everyone's loss. These are the people with the best ideas." Read more here…
Honored to talk about Innovation for Social Change with thoughtful students in the Masters in Nonprofit Leadership Program at Pacific University, and cohosted by the Nonprofit Association of Oregon. We had a candid discussion about how toxic vs. healthy workplace cultures can impact innovation.