The Stanford Social Innovation Review had a special series on measuring social impact this spring, full of so many terrific insights that it took me quite awhile to sift through all of the articles and, then, compose my thoughts at least somewhat, to post here.
I’d love to discuss any of the pieces, and I welcome your responses to my reactions, too.
Above all, I’m very glad to see this conversation within this sphere; if we’re not asking what our true impact is, we’re missing the only metric that really matters:
Are we making the difference we intend, and that so desperately needs to be made?
- It is somewhat disturbing, really, that an article entitled, “Listening to Those who Matter Most, the Beneficiaries” even still needs to be written. The article highlights some promising beneficiary feedback initiatives around the world, giving detailed descriptions of how the perspectives of students in struggling schools and of patients in health care settings are being used to inform program innovations. It is my hope that the challenges outlined and the case made for the advantages that accrue when participants (I like this term better than ‘beneficiaries’) actively shape activities can both help to push public policy in this direction, too. Then we can really get to impact.
- There is a brief outline of a larger academic paper centering on how to evaluate the effectiveness of civic engagement and advocacy efforts. Importantly, it incorporates multiple stakeholder perspectives, but I am still dissatisfied; it feels, to me, too much like asking about participant ‘satisfaction’, which may or may not be a good proxy for efficacy, even in the context of civic engagement (which, after all, is designed to foster feelings of good will within the community).
- My advocacy evaluation work focuses on using evaluation to improve performance, but we are often constrained by the inadequacies of our evaluation approaches to capture the rather elusive nature of advocacy and social change activities. This dynamic, between measuring to improve and improving measurement, is the subject of one of the articles. It mostly summarizes a workshop session related to evaluation, but I appreciate the inclusion of several specific and innovative approaches. Sometimes we have to get a bit ‘meta’, stepping back from our work in order to invest in the capacity to perform it better.
The folks at SSIR have been leading the field on the question of how to really define ‘impact’, and so it’s not their oversight, but I do think that we, collectively, need to spend more time within our organizations, our profession, and our field really clarifying what impact means, and what it looks like, in order to ensure that we will, indeed, know it when we see it.
But maybe approaching it from this direction–how can we measure it, before we are necessarily sure what it is, should offer some appeal.
If one of the reasons we have excused ourselves from getting serious about setting the bar for ‘impact’ accurately has been that we don’t know how we will be able to know when we’ve reached it, then perhaps addressing the latter will light a fire under us for the former.
Classroom to Capitol 
Taking innovations to scale
I spend a fair amount of time thinking about scale.
As in, how can we bring enough good to enough people to really make a difference?
How can we build delivery mechanisms that can make great ideas accessible to all who need and deserve them?
And how can we accomplish scale without completely losing agility and responsiveness and locality, and the empowerment that should accompany them?
There is a really thoughtful article on the Stanford Social Innovation Review about the paradoxes of innovation, and all of it is worth reading. It raises concerns about the dangers of ‘cultification’ as people follow the latest innovation to the detriment of established approaches (without necessarily attending to impact), as well as the difficulty of compromising enough–but not too much–to cross boundaries in pursuit of workable innovations.
But the piece that jumped out at me most is around the different processes needed to spark innovation and, then, to build the systems capable of scaling that innovation.
This third paradox is, itself, the subject of a SSIR article on the balance between innovation and scale.
The breakthrough for me in this analysis is the model of the organization’s capacity for continuous innovation (OCCI), which positions innovation and scale not as diametrically opposed but, instead, as both part of the organization’s evolution–in essence, innovating new approaches and then innovating the systems necessarily to scale those innovations. There is tension, clearly, as one seeks to increase variance in search of the best approach while the other decreases variance in order to standardize a system.
But tension can be creative, and, importantly, some of the same internal and external characteristics are associated with high levels of capacity in both functions, knitted together as OCCI. This is so critical, because I think that we often fall into a trap of reifying nonprofit organizations and, then, assuming that they are like people–either really good at divergent thinking or more convergent types, but fundamentally incapable of both coming up with good ideas and then figuring out how to tweak them into stability.
That can lead to dangerous type-casting, where some organizations do the scaling (often losing something valuable about the nature of the intervention) while others perpetually experiment, yielding tremendous outcomes but never able to really ‘move the needle’ on our greatest social problems.
The article includes a fairly lengthy case study of an organization innovating and scaling, but I’m interested in other examples from your own work, of how you create and sustain organizational cultures that simultaneously seek new solutions and figure out how to get those solutions to a scope and size where they can wield maximum potency.
Where do you see organizations ‘stuck’ in ceaseless innovation or, conversely, preoccupied with scaling approaches that may not deserve it? And where do you see bright spots of organizations with OCCI that helps them make it all look easy?
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Posted in Analysis and Commentary
Tagged impact, nonprofit organizations, social change