Urgency, quantified
This post sat in my drafts for 16 months because I feared coming off as someone who doesn't understand or value the importance of measurement, data, or impact. On the contrary: throughout the decade of my 20s, I worked in no fewer than 15 labs—ranging in psychology from the social/emotional ("quantifying the experience of inspiration") to the neurobiological ("visuo-spatial representations in Alzheimer's disease"). When I moved to NYC, my first job as a newly-minted postgraduate was in a neurobiology lab in the basement of Mount Sinai where I was tasked with managing the data of mice. As a doctoral student, I cultivated a certain obsessive joy in transforming the qualitative into the quantitative— coding adolescents' arguments into numbers by the nature of their quality. My favorite class in grad school was HUDM 5059 - Psychological Measurement. The all-encompassing mantra that Only Findings of Statistical Significance Are Worth Considering spread into my life outside of labs, too.
It's a natural extension that I would want to determine how to “quantify Impact" of this work as a diaper bank that desperately does not want to be a diaper bank (for all the reasons identified in previous blog posts). Except that, when I try to map what I learned from those experiences onto diaper need, I can only bring myself back to the inconvenient truth that Impact just feels to me like a philanthropic device contrived to boost a nonprofit’s feelings about its own worth for the purpose of securing its own future financial prosperity. Impact is — the way I see it — the vehicular currency through which philanthropic organizations communicate. The organizations with money that want more money craft this language with great care and pitch it to other organizations with even more money who might choose to disperse it. A demonstration of Impact is the golden ticket. Groups that can lay claim to carrying the highest impact (even if it means reaching 10,000 families with a small handful of diapers each—think about that for a moment) are poised with maximum stature, luring donors with numerical demonstrations of gravitas.
Do you need to be able to demonstrate impact to help differentiate yourselves from projects that aren’t effective or efficient? Sure. Yes. Of course. But it quickly gets a little out of hand. I’m just as puzzled by the normalized pressures of our industry to tout our program's impact as I would be by a call to try and understand whether some marginally fractional amount of fresh water or sunlight is more or less impactful on someone’s overall health and well-being than some slightly smaller quantity. All of these things are necessary. Families need diapers. The end.
On a recent call with one of our partners, we were told that our program is significant (not statistically -- just significant in laywoman’s terms) because of the continuity and number of diapers that we are able to provide. We were told that the diapers we provide are often cited by families as the most, or second-most, important service provided by these organizations. We do not trickle out diapers in small quantities to pad our numbers of how many we've helped. There- I said it out loud.
I understand why organizations do this. It's a matter of financial survival. Nonprofits must jockey for money. They're on a quest that determines their survival (become bigger, stronger, more financially stable) orthogonal to the mission (which should be, in as many cases as possible, to utilize resources with the eventual goal of closing up shop because they solved the problem. I recognize that this goal can’t apply to all nonprofits, but I think it applies to more out there than some themselves realize ).
If there’s a hole in your wall and you decide to patch said hole with little wads of putty, it doesn't matter how quantitatively impactful each unit of putty is toward the problem. What matters is that you are aware of your strategy and choices - and that you understand the history, nature, and scope of the problem, the powerful forces who are keeping it that way (whether unknowingly or intentionally), your role in the situation - and you are willing to acknowledge that another hole is forming 3 feet away from you.
What matters is that you have a plan for how to try to stop the holes from forming in the first place.
Why do we think that replacing and replenishing will solve things? Why do we put such effort into this? because we’re human, with our own short-sighted cognitive biases.
Yes, we must make our work perceptible, quantifiable- except that measurement should apply to
(1) accurately quantifying and describing the problem based on those who live it and what they want to say- not what we think donors need to hear as cogs in the fragile philanthropic machine. If we only listen at a certain volume, we will only hear what’s playing.
(2) quantifying and comparing impact among the best solutions out there, no matter how inconvenient or immense those strategies appear in their execution. We must face them and commit to them unflinchingly.