In yet another excellent and thought-provoking post, Bob Hughes raises important concerns about a focus on quantitative metrics to the exclusion of qualitative assessment. All of us pushing for greater assessment must guard against the risks Bob outlines, and I wholeheartedly agree that “the heart of measurement is comparative assessment, and this doesn’t require quantitative analyses.”
In our discussions of assessment, we must always keep in mind the question Mario Morino raises in a provocative and important new column on the VPP Web site: “To What End?” His thinking echoes Bob’s – and vice versa – in important ways. I applaud Mario for his candor and his willingness to shine the light on what he has come to see as flaws in his past approach.
Mario writes:
Here’s an example of how I looked too narrowly at outcomes—and, as a result, risked knocking nonprofits off mission.
I regret not being more open in my thinking back then. Instead of pushing back on what we were hearing, we should have done more to understand “soft” achievements that may in fact be every bit as real and important as “harder” outcomes. I aspire to do a better job of making them part and parcel of future efforts to assess outcomes and performance—even if that means using qualitative and/or anecdotal indicators.
In the early years of Venture Philanthropy Partners, we got a lot of resistance to my push for “clearly defined outcomes” from leaders whose organizations placed a premium on being holistic with their services and functioning as “community builders.” Although I agreed with them in concept, I felt that a focus on “community building” was too soft to be a legitimate outcome. Outcomes related to “community building” are, after all, radically ambiguous compared to outcomes like reduction in teenage pregnancy and substance abuse.
I now see better that serving the entire family (holistic services) and building community are some of the very things that create the environment—a web of support and community—that helps youth avoid high-risk behavior, get an education, and prepare for college or a job. But talking about “community building” was too intangible, and not readily measureable to us at the time—and, candidly, difficult to sell to our own stakeholders and the emerging field of nonprofit performance at large.
This column should be read in its entirety by every funder.
| Posted in | Assessing Performance |
| Tags | indicators, Mario Morino, quantitative performance meassurement, sharing failure, Venture Philanthropy Partners |
