Answering the questions, big-picture first

Hi again, I re-read my comment on your previous blog post and realize it was not terribly helpful, just a commiseration. Here, I'm going try to be a little more helpful, and specific. First though I have a couple of observations on what I've seen so far in the various conversations that have grown up around this.

You're getting lots of questions/advice that revolve around "measurement" of "outcomes". In another topic here yesterday I addressed this issue a little, though it is a bit muddled: http://www.socialedge.org/discussions/success-metrics/outcomes-measurement/. The basic point is that everyone is pushing for metrics for something that is inherently qualitative. Social change is not a question of moving widgets around, it is changing ideas, hopes, dreams while slowly working to restructure material circumstances. In other words, we're striving to change social structures. That, at least, is what I see you trying to do. There are plenty of projects that move widgets around, and so are amenable to simple metrics, but their long term effect is often embarrassingly superficial. Building lots of school buildings for example, does nothing to change the underlying structure of an educational system either with regard to policy or with regard to community attitudes toward schooling. But boy you sure can get some nice and easy outcome measures!

So, what then are more comprehensive approaches like ours to do? There are a few steps that we've done/are doing that I think can make a difference (at least I hope they will!)

1) articulate a coherent theory of change that gives conceptual rigor to the diverse range of activities we conduct. This is the first thing I did when I joined ETC, partly because I'm a social theory egghead but also because all I saw was a laundry list of activities being conducted in the community; it took me several months to really get a hold on what we were doing and what it meant on the ground. Forge has a wide range of projects: what makes them hang together? Is there an underlying social change process that they all are contributing to in specific way? Or is it just addressing a laundry list of needs? For your own sake, and for the sake of those you serve, you need to have a clear theory and you need to be able to succinctly present that to the community and anyone else who is interested. Now, I was going to add "namely donors" but as I've mentioned I have a skeptical attitude when it comes to what donors really want; frankly I don't think the great majority really have any interest in getting their heads around a theory of change. So this first step is for you and those you work for. But it’s not theory for theory’s sake. Theory must inform your practice. And the only way to do that is that you have to get all of your field workers understanding the big picture of what you’re working toward. We cannot expect them to be able to go in front of, eg, a donor agency like the UN or AID or whatever and make the theoretical: that’s our job. But they do need to have an understanding of how their daily work puts theory into practice and, if you truly get your participatory process working, helps to revise the theory by further refining or even changing the overarching goals of the project. This sounds very heady I know, but it’s doable.

2) define our time frame. I think it is crucial that we all get much more explicit about how long it takes to make social structural change happen. Our process entails an intensive 5 year commitment to the communities we work with, and we phase out over the course of a 6th year when we simultaneously phase in a new one. That time frame serves several purposes. It gives the community a sense that you're actually serious about working. Everyone community in every developing country has been burned at one time or another (and often many times) by organizations making big promises but delivering very little. They are justifiably skeptical about "development." Having an explicit, reasonable time frame builds trust. Second, it is a long enough time that we can in fact achieve significant change, but short enough that it doesn't build dependency. Once trust is established, a kind of urgency takes hold of the community and their level of commitment increases; they realize that you'll be leaving in 3, 4 years and they need to make the most of having you there. Third, it signals the donors and the world at large that 'this stuff ain't easy!' It takes time and diligence, there is no quick fix to poverty, if there were there wouldn't be any. But try to find a foundation that regularly gives multi-year funding: they don't. As I mentioned in my other post, they don't fund missions or coherent theories and practices of social structural change; instead they fund, primarily, the moving of widgets, that is, projects that are readily put into input-output metrics. This then, is the educational piece that hopefully, someday, may lead to more sophisticated donors. But I'm not holding my breath.

3) because of this last, identify quantitative and qualitative benchmarks to track progress toward achieving the goals derived from your theory and practice of change. What several commentators on your posts, especially in Tactical Fundraising, but is also evidenced in the metrics discussion I linked to above, seem to want is a standardized set of measures for comparing and contrasting between projects of different organizations. While comparison is certainly important (after all, presumably we all believe we’re doing something unique and effective, that is, that we’re better than lots of others out there). The problem, as I remarked in the post linked to above, is that such demand runs roughshod over the fact of idiosyncrasy: we live in a fractured social world; were it not so you wouldn’t be working with refugees because there wouldn’t be any. There are no metrics to capture all that variability and permit true comparison because that would require a unified theory of everything. Ain’t gonna happen. So what do we do? Well, that’s what I’m working on now, that is, when I’m not writing letters, proposals, repairing malfunctioning technology, working with the books, training volunteers, meeting with board members and so on and on (this is what I think so few people seem to get about small organizations: we have to do everything. It makes no sense for me, the highest paid person in the organization, to be the one crawling in with the dust bunnies, whether here in our US office or in our Kathmandu office, fixing the computers; but I’m the only one who really knows how to do that, and frankly, on purely a wage basis, I’m cheaper than the alternatives).

So what is it we’re doing. We’re plotting out each activity and identifying specific year to year impacts that directly contribute to achieving the larger social change goals to which we believe our process leads. Most of these are qualitative in nature but some (eg. increased family incomes have quantitative measures). We do have plenty of number crunching but these are mostly related to outcomes (we call outcomes the specific intended results of an activity, eg, X number of teachers trained, Y number of women establishing kitchen gardens; impacts are the interpretation/meaning of those outcomes, ie, why we should care that Y number of women establish kitchen gardens). Anyway, the end result, and we hope to have it all together by the spring, is that we will be able to assess any and every activity and demonstrate how it contributes to social change. But we will also be able to more easily relate our work to, eg, the MDGs, government education policies, etc. Furthermore, we’ll be in a better position to say $$$ leads to A, B, or C effect. While these simplistic measures will never truly tell the story of what it is we achieve, it will make our work more digestible for those with the money we need. But just as importantly, it will help us establish the internal controls to satisfy ourselves and those we serve that we are working to the best of our abilities with the resources and staff we have.

But none of this helps what you really need which is 100K by January 1! This is why I found some of the post in Tactical irritating and didn’t want to post there. These metrics take time and that is not what you have. While the flippancy with which one person said you should just ask four donors to give you 25K each (were that so easy, or even possible, I don’t imagine you would have just a 400K budget!), I think you don’t have a choice but to get on the phone and work down your list making specific requests until you get what you need. The larger issue though, as several pointed out is “what do you tell them so that they understand that this “won’t” happen again;” that is, how will this contribute not just to covering operating expenses but to the solvency of the organization. For that you don’t need to tell them anything about your metrics; as I’ve said that is essentially too much information for most donors even though it’s what gets people like you and me getting out of bed in the morning. Rather, they need to know what your fundraising plan is.

It seems to me that there is really only one explanation for your financial problem: abandoning your primary income stream. And it doesn’t seem like it would be viable to reverse that decision. So, how do you want to be funded? Grants? Individual donations? Earned income? Some combination of those or others? (We have 3 basic streams: direct mail, workplace giving and grants; we’re trying to add donor agency sub-contracts; would like to get corporate sponsorships but with 1.5 US staff, well, there is only so much I can do). Be prepared to tell people what you will be doing until the end of your fiscal year (or June 30 if you are on a calendar year) to build up one or more of these streams. And that is all you will work on. No program work. None, zero, nada. And no busy work (if your’re like me and have office manager as one of your hats, put it on the hat rack or at least exchange it for a smaller one; things will get messy but, that’s the way it goes, worry about it later). Can you really achieve solvency in 6 months? No, but you can make progress to shoring things up and show that to the donors when you go back to them. You are likely to have to make program cuts. Last year I ran a huge deficit (relative to our budget) because it was a moment in our project cycle when we couldn’t cut corners. We had the reserves so we made the investment. But this year I’m going to be the cold-hearted son of a bitch who stays within our resources. It’s going to hurt, but not so bad as if I’d done it last year. It won’t be fun, but you (we) can pull it out. And if you don’t, there is no honor lost. There would be plenty to mourn, but for the people you’re serving, life will go on. As Faulkner puts it at the end of The Sound and the Fury, in a phrase I use occasionally to give myself a slap in the face when I get too caught up in my own Western white male messiah complex: “They endured.”