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. More than 75% of the group wanted to know “whether or not a nonprofit is successfully making an impact” before donating—this issue was ranked higher than all others.

The notion of measurement is not new to the nonprofit sector; however, successfully communicating those measured results to funders, can be difficult. I recently had a conversation with the executive director of a medium-sized development organization focused on youth between the ages of 8 and 18. He has been pursuing grants that fund programs to help youth graduate from high school. He has a difficult time proving the organizations results to funders, especially because his organization is only 2 years old and most of his program participants won't graduate for several more years. What should he do in the meantime if he has a small budget and limited capacity for tracking results? How can he prove that his program leads to more participants graduating from high school? What happens after he receives the program's results? How do they package the data into a compelling argument to funders?

Mission Measurement’s motto is to keep things simple. First, start with outcomes. What is your organization trying to achieve? After that, what are your highest priorities? Then, what are a handful of simple indicators to track your progress against those goals? Graduation rates isn't a good indicators because there are too many factors that contribute to graduation rates. How about the percentage of youth who leave your program demonstrating better citizenship characteristics? That’s something you can measure and something that leads to positive youth development and enables youth to stay out of trouble.  There you go. Your story is: X% of youth in your program have developed more positive characteristics that allow them to stay on track towards being successful in school. You’ve drawn a connection between what you do and the outcome you’re trying to achieve. Additionally, you’re tracking something that is relatively easy to track and that is not time intensive for your staff.