Angel had been leading the charitable organization she founded and incorporated, as its executive director, for years now, after stepping down as board chair. Her board continued to be a great supporter of the charity’s ministry, which Angel continued to enjoy carrying out. But lately, the thought had been occurring to her that she and her organization might just be spinning wheels. They seemed to be doing the same thing repeatedly, without noticing any particular difference in the community or the population the organization served. On one hand, Angel felt that her organization had so far been a great success. After all, it had survived and was continuing to attract donations and provide charitable service. But what, really, was success? Angel realized that if she couldn’t define success any longer, she and her organization might need to change.

Good

Do charitable organizations need success measures? Or is the good that a charitable organization does inherent in its purpose and activities? Do things need to change and improve because of a charitable organization’s activities? Or are the activities enough in themselves to justify continuing to seek donations and provide charitable service with them? These questions are important to ask and attempt to answer. Charitable organization boards, leaders, donors, employees, and volunteers should all be asking these questions and looking for answers. The organization that asks and answers these questions, and evolves, resets, and improves because of that process, is a better organization than one that just keeps going through the motions without asking questions. Living things need to grow, age, die, and regenerate again out of the seeds and fertile soil that the cycle leaves. Help your organization through that living process.

Relationships

Charitable organizations succeed in large part when they foster, establish, and nurture caring relationships. A lesson I learned long ago, from someone whose identity I’ve forgotten but whose wisdom I well remember, is that in the charitable context, the transaction is less important than the relationship. Many new volunteers believe that their hands are the most-important factor. They believe that they soup the fix and serve, or the form they complete for an illiterate patron, is the value they supply in their volunteer service. Not so. The greater value to the patron receiving the service is the caring and supportive relationship the volunteer offers, along with the volunteer’s quiet model, mentoring, and witness to the hope and faith necessary for a good life. The soup will be gone in a moment, its effects dissipated within hours. But the relationship persists in the patron’s heart and soul. Someone cared for me, the patron realizes, and I want to be like them, caring for others. That’s why charitable service may be valuable simply for the fact of its occurrence, without other, external success measures.

Inspiration

Charitable-service communities are special places. I’ve been in and out of a lot of them, and in one way or another, all of them have been inspiring. The inspiration isn’t just in the charitable service itself. The inspiration is more so in the faith, hope, love, humor, empathy, care, and joy that the community’s members share. That’s why charitable service blesses the volunteers as much as it does the patrons receiving the volunteer service. All members of the charitable community benefit together through the caring spirit and purpose of the place. Although it was at times an inconvenience and even a slight burden, my own charitable service providing free legal advice to hundreds of homeless and disadvantaged individuals opened me to humor, inspiration, insights, stories, challenges, and victories of which I would never otherwise have known. And so again, the mere fact of your charitable organization’s continued existence as a caring community has its own value and is its own measure of success. Caring for forty years is a suitable testament to a charitable organization’s success.

Measures

Yet charitable organization boards, donors, and volunteers can still desire clearer month-by-month and year-by-year measures of charitable success. Some of us have a harder time seeing relationships and communities, that sort of enacted care, as a good in itself. We instead want to make a difference. We want to see people back on their feet, off the street and into decent housing, off welfare and back at a job. We want to see people recover from illnesses, graduate from school, and get out of debt. We want to see healthy children born rather than aborted, fostered children adopted and in permanent homes, marriages preserved, and domestic abuse ended. We want to see alcoholics and drug addicts recover rather than suffer and die from their addictions. Your charitable organization’s board and executive director may decide to study and identify these and similar measures of success.

Purpose

If so, if your board and executive director have realized that you all need not just to keep the doors open but also to prove to yourselves and others that your activities are making differences, then start by examining your charitable purpose. What is that purpose trying to relieve, improve, or accomplish? And what would relief, improvement, or accomplishment look like to the individuals, families, groups, or causes your organization is serving? If your organization can’t picture success, can’t identify success with reasonable specificity, then your organization may not have sufficiently defined or clarified its purpose. Your organization may need to go back to the drawing board for a clearer view of its purpose.

Numbers

Once you identify what accomplishing your organization’s purpose would look like, then attach a measure or measures to it, especially measures that involve counting and numbers. If your organization’s purpose is to get families out of debt, then how many families have done so with your organization’s help? If your organization’s purpose is instead to get homeless individuals off the street and into shelters or out of shelters and into housing, then how many individuals have done so with your organization’s help? Whatever your organization’s purpose is, find ways to count successes. The count may be in individuals or families served, meals or pounds of food delivered, beds built, homes renovated, Bibles given away, or souls saved. The numbers may be days sober, jobs gained, diplomas earned, or illnesses from which recovered. Monitor, count, track, record, analyze, and report those numbers. You’ll be amazed at what you can learn and discern.

Stories

Stories are another way to measure your charitable organization’s successes. Successes don’t always come in numbers. Sometimes, the success is not in how many but in who or what. Stories can communicate the depth and richness of successes in ways that numbers do not. Your charitable organization may help relatively few individuals but help them greatly. For instance, I helped a couple who had professional licenses and an extra residence form a 501(c)(3) organization to help single homeless pregnant mothers through delivery and back on their feet into stable relationships and housing. The mothers were generally abuse victims, not necessarily uneducated but instead acutely vulnerable under their circumstances. My clients’ new charity only helped one or two mothers at a time, maybe three or four each year. But imagine the depth and richness of their stories in recovery. Your organization must get permission to share stories and may have to anonymize the accounts. But work at capturing the stories. They’re more valuable than gold.

Images

A picture is worth a thousand words. Photographs and videos of charitable activities and appreciative patrons receiving charitable service can be wonderful testaments to your organization’s success. Encourage your organization’s executive director, staff members, and volunteers to take photographs and videos, with patron permission. Retain a professional photographer, videographer, or drone operator to capture and edit especially moving, informative, and inspirational images, not just of patrons and facilities but also of service events. If your organization’s patrons write notes or draw thank you’s, especially children’s pictures, or convey other forms of appreciation, capture and share images of those things as another success measure. 

Surveys

Surveys can be another good way for a charitable organization to measure success. Your organization may develop a protocol to have every patron who receives a charitable service complete a brief satisfaction survey. Or your organization may periodically poll patrons with special surveys. Your organization may likewise survey volunteers, donors, or staff members for responses and data on effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction, challenges, improvements, and successes. Your organization may alternatively survey community members who have no direct connection with your organization, to learn, measure, and prove your organization’s community awareness and impact. Surveys can be paper, in person, electronic, or telephone. If resources are available, your organization may even retain a survey service to help your organization collect beneficial survey data. 

Uses

Once you identify the success measures and collect the data, stories, or images, the question then becomes how to use them. Use measures that your organization is not meeting to discern how to adjust and improve services. Use measures not yet met but clearly achievable using current measures, to challenge your organization’s board, volunteers, staff members, and donors. Use measures already achieved to celebrate with your organization’s board, volunteers, staff members, and donors. Post success stories on your organization’s website, and share them in your organization’s newsletter, mailings, and solicitations. Contact local media to share special success stories. Include success measures in your organization’s flyers and on your organization’s digital marquees. Publicize successes. Doing so can hearten your organization’s board, staff, volunteers, and donors, redoubling their commitment.

Key Points

• Charitable organizations measure their success by the good done.

• Charitable relationships are an intrinsic good and success measure.

• Charitable communities are an inspiration and success. 

• Find success measures associated with your charity’s purpose. 

• Identify successes your organization can count and monitor. 

• Stories of patron successes can be effective success measures. 

• Photographs and videos can capture charity successes. 

• Patron, volunteer, donor, and community surveys can measure impact.

• Put success stories to good use in your charity’s communications. 

Read Chapter 16.