Impact measurement basics

[Alicia_Schmidt]

Corporate Social Impact (CSI) practitioners and leaders are experiencing building pressure to measure and report

	Quantity	Quality
Effort	How much is being done? # grants $ dollars spent # hours volunteered	What is the quality? How well is it done? % services/activity success rate  % attendance/participation
Effect	Is anyone better off? # or % with improvement in: skills, attitudes, behavior and circumstances

Selecting Headline Measures: The Signal in the Noise 

Through the process of impact measurement, you will end up with a large number of metrics and data  points to be tracking. But if you communicated them all, you’d lose the signal in the noise. “Headline  measures” are the ones you track regularly, that go in your dashboard and your impact reports. This is  because headline measures have:

• Communication power: Effectively communicates to a broad audience range. Tells a compelling story.  
• Proxy power: A good indicator for other measures, leverages a central importance about your  program. 
• Data power: Determine the frequency to retrieve the metric on a regular basis, and if it is consistent  and reliable.  

(Source: The Results-Based Accountability Guide, based on concepts and materials developed by Mark Friedman, author  of Trying Hard is Not Good Enough, 2005). 

Methods for Measurement

Of course, measurement methods have to be considered as well. It’s one thing to want to gather a piece of data, but it's a whole other thing to actually get it. 

Impact Measurement techniques fall into two main categories - Qualitative and Quantitative. Both lend themselves to different types of questions and stakeholder engagements. 

	Engagement	Great to…
Qualitative	Interviews Focus Groups Social Media / Text Analysis	Understand context  “Beginner's mind,” can uncover the unexpected  Answer “Why” questions Build relationships & trust
Quantitative	Surveys Process Data (i.e. clicks) Administrative Data (i.e. census)	Frequencies, ratios, numbers  Describe & correlate  Answer “What” and “How much”

How Braze Aligned on Long-Term Program Metrics

We leveraged our quarterly planning sessions to ensure that metrics aligned to our program strategy. 

Here’s how we did it:

We created a long-term strategic framework with a vision and clear program pillars –Community,  Equity, and Environment. It was essential that we aligned on each of the pillars’ initiatives and goals,  so that we could effectively communicate our programs internally and externally. 

We facilitated a session to define our vision and set long-term goals for each pillar, answering the  question: Five to ten years from now, what do we want to achieve? We brainstormed 2-3 big goals  for each pillar to achieve in the next 2-5 years.

Once we knew what our big goals were, we needed to select and define KPIs that we could use to  measure our success and effectively communicate progress to internal stakeholders.

We are now finalizing the framework with our various stakeholders. Once finalized, this framework can  be easily referenced when we need to communicate updates or enter a new planning cycle. 

- Lilian Liu

 Associate Director of Sustainability