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:
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.
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