Let’s explore your toughest questions together.

Many factors interfere with a leader’s ability to tell whether or not their programs, workshops, or events have the impact they want. Embedded in the day-to-day “noise” of everyday life, program success may be hard to discern. Did the nonprofit’s actions cause the impact or was the change due to some other influence in the environment?

We also know that leaders often want their programs to have a variety of different impacts. They might want to help attendees learn a new set of skills and change their attitudes. They might want them to make connections in the community and donate to the organization.

Useful for grant proposals, strategic planning, or program change recommendations, our measurement plans help you to evaluate these complex outcomes. By using surveys, interviews, focus groups, and behavioral indices, we can help you gauge with evidence what works best in your nonprofit organization and identify areas for actionable change.

The functioning of all organizations is built upon complex operations and assumptions. For example, you may have programs that are founded on the belief that “students learn best in teams,” or “leaders who share power with diverse others will be most successful” or “intergenerational events are the key to revitalizing religious organizations.”

These beliefs often reflect strongly held values, and, honestly, sometimes they are not the lived reality of the employees or the people served by the nonprofit.

By uncovering and testing these operations and assumptions empirically, we can help your organization understand the degree to which these are, in fact, supported. When needed, we can recommend steps to bring organizational practices, operations, and assumptions into better alignment.

Being able to succinctly demonstrate your nonprofit’s impacts is an essential activity for all organizations. What metrics matter, and to whom? How can one best communicate the outcomes of complex processes that are the result of many moving parts?

Based on our understanding of your organization’s priorities, we create tailored reports you can use for clients, funders, administrators, and colleagues to communicate your program’s effectiveness.

We can also help you design reports, presentations, and dashboards to communicate about the metrics that are central to your cause. We can set up sustainable monitoring systems to capture data you’re already generating in your daily work that allow you to share them with all your stakeholders.