How can we truly evaluate success? It may appear our organization is doing well, at least according to the numbers. To measure our progress, we tend to focus on numerical metrics like numbers of people served, an increase in new donors, or whether we hit our capital campaign goal. Grants and government contracts often come with required metrics for measurement. Yet these may not really speak to the deeper impact we’re striving to make.
For that reason, I propose that organizations take a developmental approach to measuring progress toward our goals. That means centering discussion on team learning, engagement with community members, relationships created based on progress, and what we’ve learned and discovered from the people and organizations we work with.
Think about a few simple questions:
- What progress have we made over the past 90 days?
- What have we learned?
- Who have we met, and how might they positively affect our work?
- What are our opportunities for change to create lasting impact?
These are important questions that can yield valuable information, yet they aren’t really metrics — the answers are difficult to objectively measure. But what these answers can provide is guidance in helping us search for the right metrics…the ones that really tell us how we’re doing.
We can only get to that truly valuable metric by learning it. That means understanding what real progress should look like, observing how the world actually works, acknowledging the distance between those two points, and identifying a metric worth measuring.
If undertaken regularly, this kind of developmental approach can help us avoid a common trap: getting stuck on a specific set of metrics to measure success. Instead we should let our metrics evolve. As new learning arises, we need to be open to adjusting how and what we measure. There will always be value in the traditional numerical metrics. But just as our work continues to adapt and grow, so should our measurements of progress.