Learn how to communicate your data in a way that brings people into the conversation about the story you are telling. This article will help you learn how to answer tough questions and disruptive participants.
Before even beginning to format a graph, the question we need to ask first is not “how do we visualize data,” but “how do we find the story in the data?” The five steps outlined in this article will save you time and effort before you dive straight into design.
The first step toward creating equitable outcomes for everyone is recognizing people as assets to their community. Learn more about this method of thinking, commonly known as “asset-framing,” by listening to Trabian Shorters share this approach in five one-minute videos.
Dig deeper into the common “know your audience” advice by really examining your many audiences, their level of expertise, their expectations, and more. Then learn how to translate this information into actionable steps that will make your data stand out.
Many small and medium-sized nonprofits simply don’t have the bandwidth to do everything they want. This tool includes a worksheet and instructions for how to facilitate a group discussion to examine your resources and determine your organization’s realistic top priorities.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Guide to Actionable Measurement is driven by three basic principles: 1) Measurement should be designed with a purpose in mind — to inform decisions and/or actions; 2) Do not measure everything but strive to measure what matters most; 3) Because the foundation’s work is organized by strategies, the data we gather help us learn and adapt our initiatives and approaches. This guide includes a results matrix, definitions of terms in our results hierarchy, and a set of measurement guidelines intended to shape internal decisions about depth, breadth, and rigor of measurement across grants and within strategies. The guide also highlights the good practices they aspire to follow to be good stewards and not increase the reporting burden faced by our grantees or distract from their work.
The Data Playbook section on communicating results breaks down tips on how to design your data visualization to tell a powerful story.
This Partnerships for Strategic Impact document breaks down how to talk to funders about ROI in two ways: 1) Understanding what data can and cannot tell you, and 2) Making data-informed, value-driven funding decisions.
Leaders of organizations in the social sector are under growing pressure to demonstrate their impacts on pressing societal problems such as global poverty. This Social Enterprise Initiative, Harvard Business School working paper reviews the debates around performance and impact, drawing on three literatures: strategic philanthropy, nonprofit management, and international development. We then develop a contingency framework for measuring results, suggesting that some organizations should measure long-term impacts, while others should focus on shorter-term outputs and outcomes. In closing, we discuss the implications of our analysis for future research on performance management.
Robin Hood fights poverty in New York City. The goal is to make grant decisions to maximize poverty-fighting impact, much like a financial manager chooses investments to maximize profit. The metrics project described in this manuscript has been designed to create just such a scorecard, showing ratios that guide investment decisions as financial rates and giving grants to programs that yield high benefit-cost ratios. Grant-making decisions rely on the detailed expertise of program officers as well as numerical calculations. Metrics are always under revision, a virtually never-ending project.
