Value. Impact. Effectiveness

Who would ever think that “doing good” would need to be measured? As social ventures and nonprofits are the new arenas for entrepreneurship and innovative thinking, Geoff Mulgan raises the perfect question of how do we measure social value that is historically housed in these entities? What about measuring impact? Measuring effectiveness?

The idea of measuring social value is a concept that intrigues me. I work for part of a non-profit who measures everything. Allegheny Partners for Out-of-School Time (APOST), an initiative United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania, measures the number of people we train through our professional development opportunities, to the GPAs of the students’ of the partners we work with, to the  amount of “grit” that a child possesses. We also push the providers we work with to measure as much as possible. We are collecting all this information trying to build the case for why quality out-of-school time (OST) matters.  We are doing this not only to assure every child has accessible and quality OST programming, but also because influence funders and policymakers thoughts about effective and quality OST programs.

In Measuring Social Value, Geoff Mulgan shares two reasons social measures fail to influence decisions are:

• Most metrics assume that values being measured are objective. Because values are objective, through analysis answers can be discovered
• Current measures of social value fail to influence decision makers which include policy makers because the metrics combine three very different roles: “accounting to external stakeholders, managing internal operations, and assessing societal impact.”

Mulgan also shares a better way to think about social value, discusses how the new thought of social value can determine what to measure and what to not, and finally he suggests organizations should work to assess their work in line with policy and academia.

Reflecting on this article and my work, I fully agree with Mulgan’s points. Working in non-profit and in the out-of-school time field, OST networks need to:

• Have specific reasons for every metric that is being tracked
• Cater those measures to funders and policy makers
• Keep a defined line of what information is captured for “accounting to external stakeholders, managing internal operations, and assessing societal impact.”
• Speak with policy makers and academic to ask what information they want to see have them

The information organizations collect and analyze could be wasted time if the funders and policymakers do not understand the information being presented to them. When measuring effectiveness, impact, and value, we need to make sure that the metrics are in the language that policymakers and funders want to see.  This will assure we are measuring exactly what needs to be measured to create value.