Explaining Value to Stakeholders
Harbinger Partners works as a bridge between leading companies and community-based nonprofits. By connecting skilled company employees with nonprofits in need of assistance, Harbinger Partners helps nonprofits become more effective, structures skill-based volunteer opportunities for company employees, and fosters relationships between both organizations.
We talk about the impact that we’re having in both qualitative and quantitative terms—numbers that demonstrate the change that we are affecting and stories that give this change a human face. Specifically, we have measures for each of our key impact areas:
- improving nonprofit efficiency and effectiveness
- creating skill-based volunteer opportunities and
- fostering relationships between nonprofits and companies.
We have both process and outcomes-related data for each of these areas, as well as stories that bring these impacts to life.
Knowledge of Positive Impact / Achieving Goals
We look at our measures—both informally as survey data come in as well as in more formal processes. For example, every time a client completes an engagement with Harbinger Partners, we ask them to fill out an end of project survey and participate in an interview, and then we meet as a team to review the feedback, record our learning, and make improvements to our program process. We also have an off-site retreat twice each year to take stock of how we’re doing: we look at the data, spot trends, discuss possible contributing factors, make adjustments, and then look at the data again. Evaluation and self-refection are thoroughly integrated into the work at Harbinger Partners.
How the Organization Developed its Current Process to Measure and Report Effectiveness
Before Harbinger Partners did any work with a corporate volunteer or a nonprofit, Theresa, the founder, spent nine months understanding the need for the services that Harbinger Partners would provide and researching models for service delivery. Her research served as the foundation for our current evaluation framework. Since then Harbinger Partners has maintained a commitment to grounding its work in research.
Theresa developed a first draft of the evaluation framework shortly before beginning the pilot year of work. When Zach, program director, was hired a year and a half later, he made modifications to the program process and revised the framework to align accordingly. We continue to update this framework as our thinking about our three impact areas evolves.
Why the Organization Chose to Expend Time and Resources for Metrics
We spend time on evaluation for two reasons. First, this is how we learn: by evaluating ourselves we become better at what we do, which in turn allows us to offer the best possible services for our constituents. Second, this is how we are accountable—to the companies whose people participate in our programs, to our donors, and to the community. If we didn’t evaluate our work, how we would know if we were doing a good job? How would we know what aspects of our program we should keep and which we should change to meet the evolving needs of our community? And how could we make the case that someone ought to support Harbinger Partners instead of the 1,001 other nonprofits they could choose?
So far, our evaluation efforts have mostly required staff time. This year, we are putting our program management and evaluation tools up online in order to make the work easier for our staff, our nonprofit clients, and our corporate volunteers.
Lessons Learned
Program evaluation and reflection have strengthened our organizational processes as much as they have helped us with fundraising. If we woke up tomorrow and all of our donors said they didn’t really care about our impact, we would still use our evaluation system because, ultimately, it helps us meet our mission better. We really believe that we can’t understand our impact without evaluating it.
Be clear about what you do and tie your evaluation metrics to that work. If you’re not clear about your mission, it’ll be nearly impossible to develop useful evaluation metrics. Start with your mission, then think about your business process, and then think about how you assess your impact—not the other way around. Following that order, we were able to start by articulating how Harbinger Partners hopes to change the world, develop ways that we could measure that, and in turn, ensure that our metrics really painted an accurate picture of who we are and who we hope to be.
Make the technology work for you. For the first five years at Harbinger Partners, we had reasonably simple technology solutions. We defined our business process first, and then found technologies that could simply automate parts of that process. For example, when we start our work with a nonprofit client, we ask every staff member at the client to fill out a short survey describing their comfort level using a computer; we started with paper-based surveys but eventually moved to collecting this data through a web-based system. This system mirrored the paper process exactly, making the data processing easier without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to build systems. We deliberately kept it simple, didn’t make people’s lives more complicated, integrated it neatly with our business process, and as a result, everyone uses it easily and willingly.
How the Organization’s Metrics can be Generalized
We have built our metrics into our program process from the very beginning so it is just expected that members of the Program Team will cull and enter data. At the same time, we have made very conscious decisions to make this data collection process work for the Program Team. For example, the application that nonprofits fill out in order to receive services from Harbinger Partners does double duty; we use this information to make decisions about which nonprofits we serve AND we pull some basic information about technology infrastructure from the application. Program Managers are already looking at these data in order to make a decision about a nonprofit’s application—it’s not a huge step for them to enter these data into a database that also happens to get used for evaluation purposes.
Best Metrics Story
One of the things that we measure at Harbinger Partners is leverage: what was Harbinger Partners able to deliver to the community compared to what it cost us to deliver those services. Being able to report on that requires an understanding of our costs (including a clear understanding of how we spend our time) as well as an understanding of what benefits accrued to our nonprofit clients. All of that requires a good amount of tracking. As a result of our research, we found that the value of services nonprofits receive is about seven times what it costs Harbinger Partners to run the program. Many donors find that data—our seven-fold leverage—really compelling and we use that number to convince donors that a contribution to Harbinger Partners goes further than a contribution to their favorite nonprofit. We have one donor—a new donor—who gave just because we could tell him how his money would be returned to the community.
This case study was pulled from The Center for What Works' fully-animated eLearning CD-Rom, Measure What Matters. It is available as part of The Center's Performance Measurement Toolkit. We invite you to visit our online Store to learn more.
|
|
