According to one account, the famous slogan that designates Missouri as “The Show-Me State” is attributed to Willard Duncan Vandiver, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1897 to 1903. In an 1899 speech in Philadelphia, he declared, “I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.”
No matter the exact origins of this slogan, I have thought of it often over the years when witnessing the nonprofit sector struggling to respond to a similar demand from funders: “Show me your outcomes.”
Clearly, gone are the days when funders would finance a service, program, or overhead based on the strong reputation of the organization alone.
Sadly, perhaps, the trust factor in nonprofit performance has diminished.
On the other hand, the focus on outcomes, measurement, and accountability has many positive attributes. Most nonprofits have sharpened their “game.” They do not take support for granted; they go out and earn it every day, week, month, and year.
Nonprofits have gotten the message. Perhaps, we are even overcompensating in some regards. There is no doubt that one byproduct of our increasingly relentless drive for accountability and outcomes is that we tend to be driven—or drive ourselves—to do what we can most easily measure rather than measuring what it is that we ought to be doing.
As a result, we often tend to focus on outcomes for specific projects, rather than on more broad-based—and more difficult to measure—missions. We lapse into a collective mindset that leads us to assume that if we succeed on outcomes for our projects, then we automatically succeed in achieving the outcomes associated with meeting our mission.
I am not convinced that this is the right path.
The focus on outcomes and accountability might also perversely lead us to be too cautious in our aspirations. Of course, none of us want to fail purposefully; thus, we are increasingly becoming masters of outcome statements. We design, consciously or not, outcome statements that we believe we can reasonably meet. As a result, we perhaps interchange outcome for impact. Ultimately, outcome statements become documents that pragmatically seek to achieve 1.1 times the status quo, rather 10 times the impact.
So taking into account the social and economic conditions facing the disadvantaged people we serve today, outcomes measure what we have done; they don’t necessarily drive us toward what we really need to accomplish.
At the 2010 Alliance for Children and Families National Conference, I suggested that we need to embark on a human services effort to move the focus from outcomes to impact. I suspect that achieving greater impact will drive us to a level of accomplishment that goes way beyond incremental gain.
Personally, it is my goal that the Alliance will lead efforts to realize higher aspirations, among those in our field, to collectively achieve greater impact. It should not just be what we do, but what we strive to collectively achieve. Let’s work together to have a response to the demand, “Show me your impact.”
Peter Goldberg is president and CEO of the Alliance and its parent holding company, Families International. In his capacity as president and CEO of Families International, he oversees a thriving group of affiliated organizations, including the Alliance, United Neighborhood Centers of America, FEI Behavioral Health, and Ways to Work. He has been selected by The NonProfit Times as one of the 50 most influential people in the nonprofit sector seven times since 1998. |  |
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