Align your work with your goals with Nonprofit Cloud Outcomes Management

You already use Salesforce or another database to track your donors and donations. You also have some sort of system for tracking your programs and participants. Maybe you use Salesforce for that too – or perhaps program managers are juggling their caseloads with sticky notes and spreadsheets!

What is still missing at many nonprofits is an effective way to measure outcomes. Sure, you can count the number of people served… but what about the impact you intended to have on them?

Measuring impact can seem too slippery and abstract. Figuring out what to measure and how to measure it is a project in itself, and the goalposts can seem to move from year to year. You think you know what impact you are having, and you hear it in feedback from your constituents, but how can you measure and prove which parts of your program are really working? 

Now you can track outcomes with crystal clarity in Salesforce with Outcomes Management, part of the new Nonprofit Cloud platform. 

Understanding Nonprofit Cloud Outcome Management

Nonprofit Cloud Outcome Management connects your organization’s activities and outcomes to your broader mission through a structured format known as an “Impact Strategy.” Designing and following an Impact Strategy allows you to align your work with your goals. It creates a clear path from actions to impactful outcomes.

What is an Impact Strategy? 

You’ll notice all the language in the Impact Strategy is conceptual and intangible. The final step is to turn those concepts into concrete measures. In Outcomes Management, these are called “Indicators.” 

• Indicators can measure Outputs (How many students attended Math tutoring classes?) 
• Indicators can measure Outcomes (Are the students getting better grades in Math?)

Whether or not you are setting up Outcomes Management in Salesforce, developing an Impact Strategy and identifying key indicators is a meaningful exercise for any nonprofit to go through. If you haven’t done it, you can find lots of articles and resources online and on Trailhead.

The Good News and the Better News

First the good news: Nonprofit Cloud Outcomes Management is really robust. It has the flexibility and capacity for highly effective outcomes tracking. For every part of Impact Strategy mentioned above, there is a dedicated record setup. In addition to these core elements, there are records to define units of measure (hours? pounds? meals? days?) and time periods (are you measuring impact over a yearlong arc, or over a week long workshop?). There is the capacity to record baselines, and set goals. If you have various programs and many different approaches, this tool has the ability to keep up with your dreams and help translate them into reportable results.

Now the better news: You don’t have to build it all at once! We always advise our clients start with something manageable, and build on your successes. Even if you had two or three Impact Indicators up and running by the end of the year – imagine the excitement at the next board meeting, not to mention what your development team will be able to do with that information.

Walking the Talk

Your team probably talks about your mission and vision at your annual meeting. Maybe it’s even printed on your wall, or included in the footer of every newsletter. But when it comes to the daily grind, how sure are you that your mission is baked into every crumb of the cake? Nonprofit Cloud Outcome Management puts your mission and vision into the same system that you use to manage your inputs and activities, your constituents and  your programs, so that your impact is woven into the very fabric of your work. With tangible, real-time measurements flowing under your constituent and program records, you will be delighted to learn what is really working, where you should be allocating your resources, and how your meaningful work can have the greatest impact.

Redpath is here to help you maximize the value of these tools, enabling your nonprofit to focus more on its mission and less on managing complexity. Let’s make your mission actionable and your outcomes achievable with the right tools and the right partnership.