Note: This guest post is from Traci Shirachi of The Mark. Thanks, Traci!

What has the pandemic revealed about your organization?

Are you having a harder time maintaining and expanding the resources you need – money, staff, volunteers, focused attention – to do your work successfully? Are you overloaded with increased demand for your services?

Worst-case scenario: Have you considered closing down? Do you know organizations that haven’t survived? What happened – and why?

These are challenging questions, but they reveal a deeper, even-more-essential question: Are you operating at the right scale to meet your mission? If not, how do you get to scale?

Do you understand what “the right scale” might look like for your group? Can you actually measure that?

It’s all about evaluation 

If you want to increase revenue or become more efficient or achieve systemic changes that can reduce demand for your services … well, the status quo won’t work. Something must shift.

For too long, the nonprofit mantra – delivered primarily by funders – has been, “Do more with less.” This is both unrealistic and unfair, because it assumes that most organizations have excess capacity that they can somehow trim … and still manage their workload. It fails to acknowledge increased demand for services, especially during a pandemic.

Having said that, most nonprofits do a poor job measuring their impact and figuring out where to invest and where to cut back. It’s impossible for you to know what’s working – which programs to grow, maintain, or hand off – without a thorough evaluation process. It’s also impossible to know what social results you’re achieving.

Rather than evaluate individual projects, look at the bigger picture. What outcomes do you want? What drives those outcomes?

How to create your evaluation process 

Here’s a six-step process you can use for assessment. 

1. Design a framework for evaluating your impact. What’s your logic model or theory of change? Here’s an example we use at The Mark.

2. What outcomes are you trying to achieve: short, medium, and long term? Can you sort your outcomes (substantive changes) from your outputs (the number of things you do?)

For example, your output might be providing food to 100 families each week – valuable and essential! – while your desired outcome is to reduce food insecurity in your community. To achieve that outcome, perhaps your organization chooses to engage in policy advocacy.

Your long-term goal: create a more just, equitable food system that supports consumers, farmers, and food workers – and therefore reduces the need for charitable food distribution. In this scenario, you’re working upstream to address root causes while also meeting the immediate needs of your community.

The evaluation question: How will you measure progress toward this long-term goal as a result of your advocacy efforts?

You can use your evaluation process as a framework for decision-making and fundraising. Funders and donors want to understand your theory of change and how it informs your strategy.

3. Bring this to your board for discussion. How do they understand it? Does it reflect their vision of the organization? What changes or suggestions can they offer?

4. Review your data. How does data inform your programs? How can you use data to support your strategy, operations, and donor relations? Identify what would be helpful to know that you don’t yet know.

Referring to the advocacy question above, it’s easy to collect outputs: number of emails to legislators, how many people testify at hearings, etc. The deeper work is measuring outcomes: linking your public engagement to changes in law and policy, and tracking how those changes subsequently create more equity and access. This is the art and science behind evaluation.

5. Create your data collection plan. With the understanding that gathering and interpreting data takes months and years, you need to start somewhere – so start now. As you plan, consider how (and with whom) you want to share data, because that informs what you choose to collect and how you organize it.

6. What technology tools do you need? Your goal might be to speed up data collection or make your information more readily available.

When you do this well, what happens? 

If you can:

• Define the outcomes you want to achieve
• Develop a plan for achieving them
• Gather the data needed to track and measure your progress

Several good things will happen. You can:

• Make better decisions and allocate resources more effectively.
• Demonstrate the impact of your efforts to stakeholders: program participants, volunteers, partners, donors, funders, government officials, etc.
• Create momentum within your organization based on clear, achievable goals.
• Design a path to scale your organization for maximum impact.

Planning isn’t magic, but it provides a framework to define and then deliver success.