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Conference Notebook

May 05, 2008

Charities Urged to Measure Their Impact

Nonprofit groups that work on campaigns to change policy or get people to vote must learn how to measure whether they are accomplishing their goals, Eli Il Yong Lee, executive director of the Center for Civil Policy, in Albuquerque, told a conference session.

“We have to focus like a laser on external metrics,” said Mr. Lee, whose center puts together coalitions to promote liberal causes and increase voter participation. For example, a coalition might declare success if 9,000 out of the 10,000 people it targeted in a get-out-the-vote effort showed up at the polls. However, he said, “there’s no way to say what we did caused the turnout.”

He said his organization works with local professors to design “treatment and control” tests to determine whether its activities have produced the desired results. Such tests compare the behavior of a group of people who have been targeted by a particular campaign with a control group of people who have not.

One discovery the center made this way, he said: Sending postcards to remind people where to vote was not effective in turning out voters.

Mr. Lee, a former political-campaign consultant, said his center also encourages coalitions to bring donors into their strategy sessions from Day 1. “In nonprofits, we have this weird culture where we have this wall between donors and groups,” he said, adding that is not true in other areas such as politics.

Coalitions should also assign their members to do the jobs they are best at, not necessarily those they want to do, and learn to respond quickly to changing events, “without going to 20 people to make a decision.”

— Suzanne Perry

Monday May 5, 2008 | Permalink

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