Metrics Matter.
Last month, Tipping Point Senior Program Officer Nick Arevalo presented in the Foundation Space at Dreamforce. We couldn’t be more proud of the phenomenal work Nick and the team are doing to capture our grantees’ impact in the fight against poverty. Here’s a look at the story behind our new technology solution, the Core Metrics Portal.
Developing Our Core Metrics Portal
By Nick Arevalo
At Tipping Point, we strive to increase the number of people who have reliable access to a pathway out of poverty. We work with our 46 grantees to prove and improve the models they use to educate, employ, house and support those in need. In order to understand our progress and the value of our investments, and in order to serve the organizations in our portfolio to the best of our ability, we need to track our grantees’ intended long-term outcomes and measure their performance toward them.
Because we know that reporting on outcomes is an incredibly complex, time-consuming task, we aim to make the process as streamlined and meaningful for grantees as possible. In the past, this meant we asked grantees to provide us information they were already producing for other funders. In response, we received lists of up to 60 metrics per grantee, which were often a mix of program quality measures (things like how well a whole school performed among others in the state, for example) and outcomes indicators (the number of graduating seniors from that same high school). Given the size and the diversity of our portfolio, it was difficult to aggregate or compare data, and nearly impossible to manage the findings in our database.
We faced two primary challenges:
- The need to define the metrics that would ultimately allow us to demonstrate success in the fight against poverty
- The need to come up with a mechanism for grantees to easily submit their data to us in an effort to understand impact for each group individually and across the portfolio
So we embarked upon a two-year process of gathering our grantees’ insights and talking to our peers at organizations like the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, the Marin Community Foundation and the Y&H Soda Foundation. We worked hard to align our own thinking with what our grantees find most important to support their clients to overcome poverty.
There is no industry standard for collecting, aggregating and comparing grantee data, so we developed what we now call our Core Metrics. While doing so, we found that although we were narrowing to a few key indicators of poverty reduction across our four issue areas, we also need not be too prescriptive in how we define certain terms. By tracking hours and wages in our employment category, for example, we can accommodate a wide range of interventions that are training and placing people in jobs.
To support this shift and to address the second of our two challenges, we’ve invested in a technology solution that will allow our grantees to enter their data directly into our system. Our team will then be able to review the data for quality and run analysis of portfolio-wide impact to share with grantees and other key stakeholders. Our new Core Metrics Portal is built on the Salesforce Communities platform and will be ready for soft launch this winter.
Today, we ask each grantee to report on much fewer metrics than before, but still we know that this is hard work. This process has confirmed the strength of our due diligence process and our partnerships: we work with organizations that are deeply committed to tracking and analyzing long-term client outcomes. Ultimately, we all believe that good data leads to better services and greater impact in the fight against poverty. We look forward to continuing to learn from our grantees and other funders as we refine our systems and engage in this important sector-wide conversation.
