Is what we Measure what we've Done?

Meghan and Donna have already weighed in on the newly released report from United Way of America called "Goals for the Common Good: The United Way Challenge to America." For the reasons they've already stated I am intrigued by what this report contains - and not just because it potentially has implications for my day-to-day work!

We talk about measurement and outcomes a lot here. I personally spend a significant part of my year discussing measurement with our partner agencies, and exploring ways to improve systems so that we all know what we've accomplished and how we could improve. We want to be able to tell our donors how their support has impacted the community, provide policymakers with some real-time data on what's happening in the community, and identify emerging trends so we can respond appropriately. One key challenge I have considered is to go beyond measuring individual contributions to the common good - whether that's finding housing for homeless families or providing quality afterschool programming - and to measure the aggregate impact on the community coming from a large cohort of efforts.

The "Goals for the Common Good" report challenges all of us who work in, or care about, the human service field to measure this community impact. For example, under the Income category, UWA has set the goal that lower-income families will move toward financial independence, and use the indicator of the "percentage of lower-income working families that spend more than 40% of their income on housing." This goal is laudible and directly in line with what United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley is doing in the areas of housing and employment. That being said, we are challenged to make the connection between the work we undertake and the effect that has on how much families spend on housing. It is a complex notion - that investing X amount of dollars or advocating for policies that lead to increased income or lower housing costs are directly responsible for the community-level change.

I don't have the answers, so I'll just take the opportunity to pose some of the questions on my mind. Is there a way to be sure the efforts of an organization have impacted the community? Can we assume that a change in a community-level indicator was caused by the successes of United Way and its partners? How can human service organizations develop their measurement processes to better capture community impact - above and beyond their ability to capture successes with clients served?

Maybe there are no easy answers to these questions right now; I don't know. What I do know is that this report will push al of us to think outside the box and bring increasingly sophisticated thinking to this matter, which can only serve our mission well.