Yesterday Sean Stannard-Stockton put up an excellent post titled Getting Results: Outputs, Outcomes, and Impact explaining the difference between outputs, outcomes, and impact. Looking at each type of indicator separately, Sean writes: Outputs: These are the activities done by the nonprofit. The meals served by a soup kitchen are outputs. Outcomes: These are the observed effects [...]
Editor’s note: Melanie Moore Kubo is the founder of See Change Inc., a consulting firm that specializes in helping non-profit organizations tell their stories of client progress in visually compelling yet qualitatively sound ways. We are pleased to have Melanie join us on FCP. The current movement to make philanthropy more accountable for lasting social [...]
Few topics in the social sector are as ludicrous as the allegedly excessive compensation of non-profit executives. Not only is it a comical thought that anyone truly wanting to enrich themselves would go into the poverty business, it is painfully beside the point. The debate over nonprofit executive compensation has little to do with increasing social [...]
It is no secret I believe evaluations need to be a central part of the work we do in the social sector, and that not all evaluative frameworks are created equal. Certainly establishing a reliable system for measuring organizational impact eludes us, but even in the cases that we do have reliable outcomes metrics, I [...]
We have an evaluation problem in the social sector. We want evaluations to be easy more than we want them to be right. Designing good surveys and collecting client data is hard. Rating how we feel about a particular program on a scale from one to five is easy. As a sector, we need to [...]
I’ve written extensively on how the social service sector needs to be more data driven, that data and outcomes analysis should drive what we do and how we do it. This argument is not unique, pretty much everyone makes this argument. The real question is how do we determine what is working, and what is [...]
