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.

In a last month’s Chronicle of Philanthropy, Lisabeth Schorr, a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Policy, debunked these perceptions with her article “To Judge What Will Best Help Society's Neediest, Let's Use a Broad Array of Evaluation Techniques.”  According to Ms. Schorr, organizations can overcome the pressure to conduct costly and impractical research and escape the narrowly defined evidence-based credibility by adopting a results framework.  “One attractive alternative,” she writes, “is to adopt a ‘results framework.’ Sponsors at the national, state, or local level select outcomes that the public values and the indicators that measure progress toward those results.  Then the community organizations determine — on the basis of research, theory, and experience — the actions likely to contribute to attaining those goals, be they proven or promising approaches, new combinations of programs, stronger infrastructure, new capacities, or the development of innovative efforts.”

Mission Measurement has helped hundreds of organizations develop practical measurement techniques that are anchored in near-term outcomes.  This approach bridges the void in evidence that challenges so many organizations:  tracking activities and process does not equate to measuring results while proving long-term systemic impact is often too costly and too late.

Ms. Schorr concluded that “Unless we embrace the alternative approaches that incorporate many ways of knowing, many sources of knowledge, and more-inclusive methodologies, we will be robbed of essential information, and the nation's children and youths will be robbed of a more hopeful future.”

We agree.