Counting What Counts: A Nod to “World Metrics Day”

Ok, so perhaps its a little silly, but Acumen Fund and the others behind the Pulse initiative have declared today, June 16, as World Metrics Day. Yes, it’s fairly arbitrary and no, those of us in the ‘metrics community’ don’t expect families to be gathering with picnics to listen to local bands and buy cupcakes at bake sales. But, it is nice to see enough interest in this topic to even jokingly proclaim a celebration, let alone to actually convene people around such an important topic and build tools to make the concepts tangible.

Pulse is a platform designed to help Acumen Fund, and soon others, track basic performance data from its investees. Acumen Fund worked with a variety of heavy-hitters including Google, Rockefeller Foundation, Salesforce.com and PWC to define a metrics taxonomy and build a platform which on-the-ground organizations can use to enter performance data and funders can use to get a better sense of the returns of their investment. Pulse is an ambitious endeavor that is already gaining traction.

Interest in the space will be increasingly beneficial in that tools such as Pulse can not only bring more accountability to investors, but have the potential to help organizations actually perform better through data-driven decision making. Now... to realize that potential.

There seems to be increasing agreement among donor/investor communities that accountability is important. Various initiatives, from Pulse to New Philanthropy Capital’s idea of an “Association of Nonprofit Analysts,” to name a few, are evidence of this trend. This, we feel, is quite positive. It is important, however, not to get tracked into focusing only on the funding site of the equation. Though we very much applaud funder efforts to ensure their grants and investments are indeed productive, the point of impact reporting should not be to put funders’ minds at ease, but to ensure that the programs that are funded have tools to continually improve their work and thus become more effective at reaching programmatic goals.

There is much debate about who should determine metrics and require organizations to report on them. There are logical arguments on both sides—funders have a right to know if their money is being used wisely and organizations have a right to tell their story fairly. For us, the debate is not so much about origin but rather about end goal. Organizations and their supporters should be aligned with regard to end goals, and those end goals are what should determine metrics. What this means is that context is key. Performance measures hold little value without a contextual understanding of the conditions/sector/geography/geopolitics/etc. in which an organization operates.

So what does this mean with regard to metrics determination and implementation? Regardless of whether funders or organizations drive the process, those doing the actual work on the ground must have a say in what performance indicators are used. They must accurately reflect what a social enterprise or NGO can achieve in its operating context and, above all, provide valuable information it can use to do what it does, where it does it, even better. If that’s not also the funders’ end goal, then there is a misalignment.

World Metrics Day may be simple fun or the initiation of a movement (hopefully the latter). Regardless, it denotes the early stages of what will hopefully be a move from counting simple outputs to truly enabling social and environmental organizations to continue to learn, grow and ultimately do the best work they can with the resources at hand.