More than Numbers
The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies (Schusterman) developed this More than Numbers guide for organizations who seek to apply a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) lens to their internal data collection processes and assess and improve how they collect constituent information through tools such as alumni surveys and program evaluations. This guide does not address data collection for formal demography, national population estimates or academic research.
Nonprofit Fundraising Metrics
Donor Searches "Nonprofit Fundraising Metrics" article breaks down 26 ways to accurately measure your organizational progress, successes and shortcomings (and then build on those lessons for future campaigns). Nonprofit KPIs, or nonprofit fundraising metrics, can improve strategies, programs, and, ultimately, fundraising numbers if your nonprofit tracks them wisely. This guide covers everything you need to know about nonprofit fundraising metrics and offer 26 essential KPIs for your nonprofit to track by going over the following: Overview of nonprofit fundraising metrics, Nonprofit fundraising metrics best practices, General nonprofit fundraising metrics, Donor relationship metrics, Giving level metrics, Engagement metrics, Online performance metrics
Key Steps in Outcome Management
This is the first in a Urban Institute series of guides to help nonprofit organizations that wish to introduce or improve their efforts to focus on the results of their services. This first guide, entitled Key Steps, provides an overview of the outcome management process, identifying specific steps and providing suggestions for examining and using the outcome information
The Generalizability Puzzle
The Stanford Social Innovation Review's Generalizability Puzzle is a paper that recognizes that any practical policy question must be broken into parts. Some parts of the problem will be answered with local institutional knowledge and descriptive data, and some will be answered with evidence from impact evaluations in other contexts. The generalizability framework set out in this paper provides a practical approach for combining evidence of different kinds to assess whether a given policy will likely work in a new context. If researchers and policy makers continue to view results of impact evaluations as a black box and fail to focus on mechanisms, the movement toward evidence-based policy making will fall far short of its potential for improving people’s lives.
Measuring Success How Robin Hood Estimates the Impact of Grants
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.