Why Commit to Continuous Quality Improvement

4 Reasons to Track, Evaluate, and Articulate your Organization’s Impact

Chris Brodnan collaborates with Purpose Possible on a new suite of services, offering support to clients in tracking, evaluating, and articulating their organization’s impact. With more than 10 years in the nonprofit sector in Atlanta, including the last four as the Regional Program Director at a summer learning organization, she has extensive experience developing and leading quality improvement strategies. She is excited to share why this work is important to help fulfill your mission and ensure program quality and fidelity. 

In May, we began the conversation on the importance of committing to a formal Continuous Quality Improvement Strategy (CQI) with an initial blog post on this relevant topic. In it, we posed the question “Do you have a clear strategy on how to track, evaluate, and articulate your impact?”  If you remain unsure of your answer to this question, we want to share four reasons on why you should invest in a strategy to affirm delivering mission-aligned successful programs are top of mind at your organization. 

1. Clear metrics demonstrate program strengths and opportunities 

Without having an evaluation plan with clear and measurable data and outcomes, you cannot clearly define where your program is succeeding and in need of improvements. This can be particularly useful if you are running multiple programs from different locations - you may know some sites are more successful than others but without benchmarks, can you clearly articulate why? With a dashboard of aligned Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to compare sites to one another, you can lean into what aspects of each program run well and where potential opportunities exist. Examples  include number of attendees/participants, percentage of returning attendees/participants, and percentage growth of new attendees/participants. 

2. Data provides power to make key decisions  

Once you have developed KPIs and have clear benchmarks of what is working and what is not, you can be empowered to make potential tough decisions. Need to close a program site? The data can be a clear indicator of the rationale and arm you with the evidence you need to make a difficult call. On the flip side, have you discovered your secret to success that will allow you to scale your program? Now you can share that with funders and explain why they need to invest further in your work! 

3. Evaluations tell a story of your impact  

There is always a story behind the data that goes beyond quantifiable numbers. Just because you served a specific number of individuals how do you know were they better off because they came to your program? Evaluations, whether external assessments or internal surveys, provide complementary qualitative data that allow you to build on successes and share more broadly with stakeholders. 

4. Improvement over time demonstrates long-term success and sustainability

When you are collecting year-over-year data as part of a CQI process, you are ideally setting the performance goals higher each year and adjusting your work to align with the feedback you received as part of your assessment. The longer you engage in this process, the more you can demonstrate annual improvements and ideally growth and sustainability in your work. 

If your organization needs support with evaluation and metrics let us know! We are here to help! Feel free to contact Chris at cbrodnan@purposepossible.com or send a message to info@purposepossible.com to get more information on how we can help!