Vanity Metrics are Killers
Media, and specifically social media, is a powerful tool.
Algorithms and influencers exalt the viral over the worthy, the popular over important, and the accessible over true, ultimately for profit. Supply and demand for information is made even more extreme, based on the rate and pace which it is increasingly shared and consumed. This two-sided nature of sharing is pre-biblical; one only has to have a modest appreciation of Socrates to know this sacred, sacrificial battle between the sophists and philosophers.
What this means for those with an earnest interest in effecting change, is that you’re constantly jockeying between stances of what’s selling and what’s valuable. For everyone trying to make a living this way, it’s even worse. Socrates was martyred, lest we forget.
From a nonprofit lens, the issue is this: This struggle to message reality over what people want to hear has serious implications to those in social impact organizations.
What I’ve seen over the course of many years in and out of the industry, is that nonprofits are more often than not forced to strive for, report and message meaningless metrics in order gain and retain interest -and by interest I mean funding (see also: standardized testing in American public education). This is neither sustainable nor scalable without fraud, waste, and abuse. Narrow definitions and timelines of success help no one other than a sponsor who can in return manipulate the narrative to benefit himself or his shareholders.
The crux of the problem of systemic nonprofit (in)effectiveness lies in the reliance of capital sources that demand pre-determined, and frequently self-serving outcomes to measure success. Traditional sponsorship of a nonprofit’s cause (and similarly, a venture capitalist’s investment in a startup) is linear. “I give you this money and you report that outcome. If you fail, it’s because you’ve mismanaged funds.” But startups and nonprofits (and especially startup nonprofits serving startups) operate in huge volumes of uncertainty. We are driven by measurable outcomes too, obsessively so, because we care deeply about impact. But there’s much pivoting, open mindedness and testing needed to find that offering/market fit. Nonprofits are problem-focused, but that doesn’t mean we don’t also need runway to find our customers, channels, and craft our solutions for long term sustainability.
Recently I saw Victor Hwang of the Kauffman Foundation speak on how to grow entrepreneurial ecosystems, and it hit home when he said “you don’t grow a forest by only planting trees”. Expectations of linear progressions to success will only beget premature failure. Trees can take hundreds of years to grow, but there’s true value in the groundswell that happens in between now and then. And while we’re always impressed by the number of rings a tree has when it’s cut down, by that time, it’s already dead.
Instead of the status quo, let’s forge a new path. I’ve made a personal commitment to do due diligence and forecast outcomes that embrace uncertainty in order to reveal long term vibrancy. I’ve witnessed how strong, smart leadership backed by forward thinking funders (thank you, AEDP) can cultivate powerhouse ecosystems. I begrudgingly agreed to be a part of a nonprofit because that’s what I want to effect — not another throw away metric.
