Less than 10% of Charities Measure Outcomes

by Nathaniel Whittemore

Published February 17, 2009 @ 09:02AM PT

One of the regular discussions on this blog is about how we best assess impact? We've got a guest column by Jason Saul of Mission Measurement about the topic, and I listed "Measuring Social Impact" as one my top trends shaping social entrepreneurship in 2009.

My general feeling is that we focus far too much attention on the easy numbers to measure because they're easy to measure. Often the easy to measure things don't tell you much about the impact you've had. Maybe the most frustrating easy indicator was the "percentage of budget spent on overhead" measure. Not only is the amount of overhead needed highly variable across the nonprofit sector, in general, it is problematic to focus on measuring inputs rather than outcomes. Furthermore, I tend to think that our reliance on "less than 10% spent on overhead" as an indicator of quality has been instrumental in warping the way we recruit and support employees across the sector.

Which is why it was so encouraging to see the President and CEO of Charity Navigator Ken Berger blog last December that CN would be slowly moving towards a new system of measurement that emphasized outcomes. Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy wrote about the shift in a post titled "Charity Navigator's Big Move."

Yesterday, Sean tweeted a link to a post by Ken Berger about how the move was going. In "A Scary Finding on Outcome Measurement," Berger writes:

...we have been on a "listening tour" that includes researching existing tools that may help us in developing our system...We have been testing out what information charities are currently compiling in the area of outcome measurement. We also intend to use the information to help us in developing our system. If there are some universally agreed upon outcome measures in a particular category of charities, it could help inform us on good standards. We assumed that most charities have SOME system of evaluating their outcomes. However...So far, less than 10% of the charities we have polled have provided us with information in this area.

This is not super suprising. As someone who's been building an organization within another nonprofit (the Center for Global Engagement, which is a part of Northwestern University), I know how easy it is to focus on the day-to-day. It's only when we wrench ourselves out of our own immediate reality and force ourselves that we think about the actual measurement piece of things.

But it is a problem. Our reliance on anecdotes and compelling naratives tends to make for a sector that too often rewards charisma more than impact. I'm glad to see Charity Navigator taking this problem on and we'll follow their progress.