When Kevin Starr, CEO of the Mulago Foundation, generously agreed to join our Give’r team for a conversation about measuring impact, we knew he would fire us up.
Like Power to Give, Mulago provides unrestricted funding to about 60 charitable organizations they believe can make a big impact. They also go “beyond the cheque” to welcome charity leaders into a fellowship program that teaches them about designing for impact, strategizing for scale, how to build a good organization, and how to fundraise.
Keving defines impact as an observable, material difference in the world attributable to your efforts.
He’s the first to admit that measuring impact is tough, but Mulago’s cardinal rule is they don’t fund any organization that does not measure impact.
“If they don’t know what they’ve accomplished, we can’t either. Without measurement, organizations can struggle to be accountable to their beneficiaries and won’t have the information they need to get even better at what they do.”
Mulago recognizes that early-stage organizations are just beginning to figure out their key metrics and how to collect them. As funders, they’re looking for a progression that shows increased rigor over time. And they work closely with their beneficiaries throughout the process.
Kevin talked about the vital distinction between activities and the results of activities (impacts).
Examples of impacts: better nutrition, healthy fisheries, improved literacy
Examples of activities: people reached, workshops, engagement
The team at Mulago have identified four principles that they believe enable an organization to really understand measuring impact and to think about impact better.
- Know what you’re trying to accomplish
- Measure the right thing
- Show that change happened
- Make sure that it was you
Knowing what you’re trying to accomplish is your mission statement, and Mulago uses a model they call the eight-word mission statement: a noun, a verb, a target population, an outcome.
That simple, clear mission can lead a charity directly to the one main thing it needs to measure.
The next step is to get a baseline for that measure, and keep measuring so you can show how change is happening against the baseline. That takes time – and a big enough sample size.
Number 4 is the toughest: how do you make sure that it was your organization that drove the change? Kevin calls this the “counterfactual.” What would have happened if your organization wasn’t there doing the work, compared to what did happen?
To see – and hear – some examples of this work we hope you’ll find 12 minutes to watch and listen to the presentation, which is posted here.
Our sincere gratitude to Kevin and Alex from Mulago, and to our Give’r team, for participating in this important conversation about measuring impact.