The BBB Wise Giving Alliance, GuideStar USA and Independent Sector launched “Charting Impact,” a standard framework to easily and clearly understand the objectives, benchmarks for progress, and impact of nonprofits and foundations. Charting Impact uses five deceptively simple questions that require reflection and discussion about what really matters – results.
- What is your organization aiming to accomplish?
- What are your strategies for making this happen?
- What are your organization’s capabilities for doing this?
- How will your organization know if you are making progress?
- What have and haven’t you accomplished so far?
What if organizations focused these simple questions on their social media strategy using common sense measurement as my colleague Kami Huyse describes it in Geoff Livingston‘s, forthcoming book Welcome to the Fifth Estate.
What if we made sure the process for identifying SMART objectives included capacity building, measurement, and reflection? What if we stepped away from the process of checking off items on our to do list, and spent a little bit of time charting impact of our nonprofit’s social media use?
Jeff Hurt says
Beth:
Love these five simple questions! They could lead to some great discussions too.
I would add a sixth one that would naturally follow these five: What’s our evaluation process? During this discussion, we should ask: What is working for us? What needs to be tweaked? What should we stop?
This would help people assess and evaluate what they are doing as well as its effectiveness.
Beth says
Jeff: What I really like is the simplicity. Being able to summarize the answers one on page – is also really useful for focusing. I like your sixth question about evaluation process is great.
I think there is also an embedded question that is “What have you learned?”