Measuring Our Impact

As we transitioned from building to operating, we knew we had to improve our performance management. We liken it to driving a bus full of passengers (our nonprofit partners), but we didn’t know how fast we were going and how the passengers like the ride.

The Board understood the need to measure our performance and made it a high priority. Realizing we needed help in program measurement and evaluation, we reached out to CNM (formerly the Center for Nonprofit Management). CNM’s innovative evaluation consulting and outcomes technology services give nonprofits the ability to efficiently and effectively track, analyze, evaluate and report outcomes.

They worked alongside us, guiding the development of a robust evaluation plan and protocol to expand our continuous improvement capacity. Because CNM received a generous grant from the Moody Foundation, CNM funded most of the cost for developing our performance management system.

We spent the spring building a detailed logic model that connects our inputs and activities to outputs and long-term outcomes. This effort helped us identify ten overarching outcomes. With this understanding, CNM conducted a focus group with our nonprofit partners to hear from them directly. This effort helped us understand our nonprofit partner’s concerns and measure their satisfaction with our services.

We now have a well-developed survey tool and online dashboard system that helps us collect and present our performance data to the Board and staff. This system gives us insight into how we are doing and where we can improve. We have already started two initiatives to address areas identified in the 4th quarter survey to better serve our nonprofit partners.