Wednesday, August 21, 2019
Greetings from the
Evaluation Team for national nonprofit organization
MHP Salud! This post discusses strategies for measuring your mission.
Most organizations adopt a mission statement to guide their work. While alignment with this mission is arguably an organization’s most important metric, evaluating it can prove challenging in practice. Metrics defined by external stakeholders (e.g., funders) often drive evaluation efforts. Even if you manage to carve out time to evaluate your mission, where do you start?
At MHP Salud, we started by
breaking our mission statement into “evaluable nuggets” as follows:
1. Program completion time can vary depending on the health outcome targeted. For example, some services may last 2 weeks, a few months, or up to 1 year.From here, we
identified specific metrics that would allow us to evaluate alignment with each of these components. We were already measuring some, but others required researching external literature and adapting metrics to our needs:
Lesson Learned:When MHP Salud analyzes and summarizes our organizational outcomes on a quarterly and annual basis, this structure gives us precise insight into the extent to which we are fulfilling our mission. Having this information can affirm our work and/or raise areas requiring deeper analysis and potential adjustments.
Although no external entity is asking for ongoing evaluation of our mission, the practice serves as an internal accountability tool and is well worth the time and effort required to set up the initial system, collect the data, and analyze results on an ongoing basis.
For more information about MHP Salud, including Training and Consulting offerings, visit
www.mhpsalud.org.
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.
About AEA
The American Evaluation Association is an international professional association and the largest in its field. Evaluation involves assessing the strengths and weaknesses of programs, policies, personnel, products and organizations to improve their effectiveness. AEA’s mission is to improve evaluation practices and methods worldwide, to increase evaluation use, promote evaluation as a profession and support the contribution of evaluation to the generation of theory and knowledge about effective human action. For more information about AEA, visit www.eval.org.