Measuring Impact: A journey to grow your organization’s results capacity

Measurement and Impact. How long have we, as a sector, been tossing around these terms? And how many times have you been asked questions like these?

What impact is your program having?
What difference are you making in the community through your efforts?
Why does our organization give money away and how will that help our business?
What are you doing with all the reports you collect from our partners?

Well, our new data, from the PEAK2019 conference survey, shows that we have definitely made progress in growing our organizations’ results capacity over the past decade, but there is still more to do. The biggest shift has come with organizations at the lower end of the Results Capacity Model for those in the Minimal/None and Basic categories, moving from a combined total of 75% of funders, down to only 33% of funder respondents.

But that leads us to ask questions like:

How do we go farther?
What are the current gaps?
What is holding us back?
What can grant managers do to help our organizations continue to grow our organizational impact?

As a next step toward answering those questions, join our upcoming webinar where we’ll take a deeper dive into the survey results, and offer practical solutions to grow your organizational results capacity by:

• Investing in your partners in different ways––perhaps to help them build their capacity through new program development; to support their infrastructure needs to help improve their effectiveness or efficiency; or deepen your organization’s investment in systemic change, either through policy reform or best practice development.
• Creating collaborative solutions, whether you seek to partner with other funders to deepen your impact or perhaps bring together grant partners to help them deepen their results for those they serve and ultimately deepen your organizations impact. Remember that you are the connector and, therefore, the catalyst to supporting their impact.
• Perhaps you’ve started down your results journey, but not getting the results you expected. For your organization, the challenge may be understanding how to create a clearer vision of your goals and how you can achieve them, so your grant partners are set up for success.

And finally, to answer the question of how you, as the grant manager, can lead the charge to getting to impact, my colleague Wendy Watson-Hallowell, The Belief Coach, will join me to help you learn how to shift your perspective and influence your organization’s progress on the journey to results. Wendy will share ways to see yourselves as a key advisors and influencers for change, and provide a method to better describe the ‘gap’ between where the organization is now vs. where it could be, in ways that motivate leadership and partners to take action.

On November 5, join us for Using a Measurement Framework: The Implementation Challenge. We look forward to a robust dialogue, and sharing the survey results and our perspective with you. Click here to register for the webinar.