You know how it is at home – especially if you have a big family: without structure, everything turns into chaos. But since each child has their own personality, you also need to be flexible enough to meet their individual needs.
The same principles apply to your change collective—the team you’ve assembled to drive systemic change.
In the fifth part of our series on systemic change, we’ll explore the connection between structure and freedom—or consistency and flexibility, as we call it—in measuring and reporting the change your collective is creating.
Series: Funders Guide to Change
As a funder, donor, or investor, you play a special role in systemic change. You are the one who points out the overarching goal and assembles the team that can make the necessary change happen.
To succeed, you must ensure that the goal is clear, your community is in sync, and that you consistently measure the development that takes place.
In this series, based on Adam Luecking’s book Social Sector Hero, we go through eight key strategies that can help you build an effective, system-changing alliance.
If you want to read Adam Luecking’s book in its entirety, you can download it for free as a PDF here.
In short, the partners in your change collective need both consistency and flexibility to measure and communicate their work meaningfully.
As a funder, your task is to group the programs you support—like mentoring programs in one group, workforce training in another, and youth wellness programs in a third.
Next, you’ll need to identify a small, precise set of metrics that fit each of these groups. This consistency will give you the data you need to tell a cohesive story about the impact of the entire collective.
You can then enhance and nuance that story by allowing each participant in the collective to report on a supplementary set of metrics that reflect their unique goals, target groups, and approaches.
Consistency is Key to Progress
Let’s start with a definition: in our context, consistency means that everyone in the change collective either does things the same way—or does selected things the same way—to advance towards the common goal.
Imagine a professor teaching a university class of 25 students. If the professor had to tailor their lessons to each individual student, they’d have to deliver 25 one-on-one sessions instead of one collective lecture.
This lack of consistency wouldn’t just waste resources; it would also make it incredibly difficult to track the class’s overall progress.
As a funder, you’re the professor of your collective. With your vision, knowledge, resources, and unique position, it’s your job to facilitate consistency.
You need to ensure that there are standardized performance metrics that allow you to compare progress across similar programs. This means that each group of programs should have two or three consistent metrics.
These uniform performance metrics will enable you to paint a complete picture of the impact your collective is achieving. And they’ll allow you to assess the value of your investments in each participant in the collective.
Learn from Adam Luecking in Copenhagen
How do you create measurable social change across sectors?
Adam Luecking has been dealing with this question for two decades. And in September, he is coming to Copenhagen to share his experiences.
Adam Luecking is the CEO of the American company Clear Impact, which advises philanthropic and political leaders on creating systemic change in cross-sector alliances.
In his book Social Sector Hero, he presents a framework for systemic change – consisting of eight sub-strategies.
Understand the strategies and find your way to create social progress.
You can meet Adam Luecking at Impact Insider on September 18 at 9am and again at 1pm at Lygten 39, 2400 Copenhagen NV. Register here.
Flexibility Creates Opportunities
Now for another definition: in our context, flexibility means allowing people to be creative in designing strategies, measuring success, telling their stories, and carrying out their work.
The structure you’ve established with performance metrics gives you consistency and cohesion. But you also need to reflect the diversity within your change collective.
Imagine you’re funding three programs that operate in much the same way, but with different focus areas: one introduces kids to sports, another focuses on reading, and the third on artistic expression.
Of course, you’ll want to track participation, program quality, and the effect on students’ performance. But since sports, reading, and art each have their inherent values, you may need specific metrics for each focus area.
The ways in which these programs engage young people can also differ. And you can only capture the essence with customized metrics chosen by the individual program managers.
As long as the basic standards and values are in place, you can afford to be extremely flexible in how your partners in the change collective organize themselves.
Flexibility increases the chances that you’ll discover new and different strategies for creating impact. Ultimately, flexibility is an invitation to innovation.
5 Areas Where You Can Successfully Combine Consistency with Flexibility
Consistency and flexibility are two important management mechanisms. And their application goes far beyond measurement and communication.
They permeate everything from major decisions like investments, measuring collective results, and strategic planning to smaller everyday tasks like sending emails, applying for grants, and more.
Here are examples of areas where a bit of consistency and flexibility can work wonders.
Language
Consistency in language is a management tool that’s like giving everyone on your social impact journey the same map and the same directions.
By using a ‘common language,’ you simplify communication. When apples mean apples to everyone, you avoid the verbal fruit basket where people mix apples, pears, and bananas.
Everyone can see the path forward, spot obstacles, and discuss new routes. And you’ll spend less time explaining systems and methods, with fewer misunderstandings and less confusion.
Make sure there’s linguistic consistency in everything you do—both internally and externally.
So where does flexibility come in?
Well, no one says you have to stick to terms used elsewhere. Do you prefer talking about outcomes or results? It doesn’t matter as long as you’re consistent, terms maintain consistent definitions, and everyone in your collective uses the same terms.
Social Change Framework
Using a consistent framework creates clarity that makes life easier for everyone.
The specific framework you choose doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s consistent for everyone.
Flexibility comes into play when you allow some leeway in the chronological implementation of the overarching framework. After all, a framework isn’t a religion. And you won’t be doomed forever if you implement the steps in the order that makes the most sense to you—or even skip a step.
Start implementing where you are, with the resources and information you have available. You can always go back to the steps you skipped.
Grant Distribution
Use consistent standards for applications—and make them as simple as possible. This allows evaluators to assess applications against the same objective criteria and compare the quality of one application to another, leading to better investment decisions.
Complement this with an open section in your applications that gives your applicants the chance to tell their unique stories. Give them plenty of space to make their case.
Reporting
Once your performance metrics are in place, it’s important to focus on consistency in reporting. This creates a common way of viewing data.
Simply put, you don’t want one grantee to report in the form of a pie chart, another in a bar chart, and a third in a graph. You want to see the data presented in the same way and in the same format to improve your decision-making process.
There isn’t much room for flexibility here. But you can allow it by permitting prose storytelling alongside the graphics. This gives your grantees a chance to explain why the data looks the way it does. You should never ask for data without giving people a place to report the story and context behind it.
Systems and Tools
Require participants in your change collective to report data using the same IT system. This greatly improves your ability to analyze across programs and makes it easier to navigate and organize your data.
Similarly, a shared IT system allows you to organize all your information in one easily accessible place and compare everyone’s progress.
Flexibility shows up in the qualitative information that grantees can provide in their reports. It’s important to choose a system that allows for comments on individual data points and the overall data trend.
Remember to offer capacity building, training, and support for effective use of the system you’ve chosen. Not everyone has the same technical skills, so good support from you will lead to greater buy-in to the reporting system and more consistent use.
In the next part of our series on systemic change, we’ll dive deeper into how to tell the powerful story hidden in the data.
And don’t forget, you can meet Adam Luecking in Copenhagen on September 18th. Read more here.
