Every so often, you speak to a colleague in your field who understands issues and solutions at a very clear and deep level. My colleague Rick Groves and I had a great conversation with Christopher Lohse of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) recently and we wanted to share some of what he is thinking about with respect to education data.  

In continued affirmation of this year's CSR trends, Todd Cohen of the Philanthropy Journal wrote on Wednesday, "In an economy and marketplace undergoing sweeping changes because of the recession, experts say, companies increasingly aim to make their giving more strategic, collaborative and productive."

Often met with a dreadful shudder or apathetic roll of the eyes, measurement can be an unfriendly topic among leaders of nonprofit organizations or program officers.  It can be seen as academic exercise that yields little useful information or, worse yet, a way for innovative and likely effective programs to be pushed off the table because measuring their impact seems impossible to do without unlimited time and resources.

What do I include on a dashboard? How do you guard against cherry picking metrics to look good? How do you select the highest quality metrics? Can you have too many metrics? These were some of the questions that participants raised during a recent webinar hosted by Guidestar and CompassPoint, called How to Build an Organizational Dashboard: Track and Measure Organizational Performance Easily and Inexpensively. The presenter provided a simple example of how organizations can use data to track their progress and share their results using dashboard.

If you are someone deeply involved in the nonprofit sector, you most likely receive daily emails, newsletters, or updates with some permutation of the following words: how to, nonprofit, survive, fundraising, downturn, results, and impact. It’s probably not a surprise that in this resource-constrained climate, many funders and donors are more targeted in their grantmaking and donating. They are demanding more data-driven results from grantees and less anecdotal evidence. In a recent survey, a group of 30-49 year-olds were asked to rank the importance of certain topics when considering donating through social media.

"...I’m here today to announce that the State Department is opening its doors to a new generation of public-private partnerships. We will expand current partnerships and embark on new ones. We’ll embrace collaboration and become more receptive to the ideas and approaches that you will bring to us. And we want to deploy the full range of tools available..." -Secretary of State Hilary Clinton at the Global Philanthropy Forum (April 22, 2009) Source: US Department of State