Measuring Impact???

In July 2008 I particpated in the Harvard Business School's Social Enterprises Executive Education program Strategic Perspectives for Nonprofit Managers (SPNM). It was one of the best and most transforming weeks of my life.

Here are all of the links and topics for posts from SPNM:
Overview
Inspiration
Capacity
Leadership
Scale
Strategic Service Vision
Mission and Strategic Triangle - Legitamacy & Support / Organization / Mission
Value Chain
Market Research
Measuring Impact

How do you define the impact of theatre? It seems easy to quantify the work of other non-profits. But what about the arts?

In nonprofits we a talk a lot about assessment and measurement. “You need to do an assessment of your thinking before you invest!”

In business you need to be ahead of the curve. You need to manage situations – be in a constant state of awareness, assess how things affect your organization, and have the ability to act (create change). You are in a constant state of assessment. But can you assess a situation without some form of quantitative analysis.

I can hear everyone screaming – well Jodi, just count the number of people in the audience and you will know how you are doing, but I just don’t think that is actual analysis of whether or not we are fulfilling our mission. Seating capacity has its place, but it comes in later.

So how would you do an auditable analysis of the Playhouse’s attempts to fulfill its mission? What data do we need to tell our story? And how do we get it? How do we add evaluation to the planning of programs?

You can evaluate the process or you can evaluate the impact.

So how do you audit the results?

First and foremost, we can measure outcomes through the audience’s future participation in more Playhouse events. The number of events an individual attends reflects a deeper experience and more engagement. If an individual participates in play club, talk-backs it reflects a deeper experience and more engagement. If they bring their children to the playhouse for education programs it reflects a deeper experience and more engagement. If they donate money or time to the theatre they are having a deeper experience and are more engaged. And yes, if they are deeper engaged they will bring friends of like minds and seating capacity will increase.

Next, we can measure if we are adding to the theatrical canon by the on-going life of plays and musicals we develop and premiere.

We can watch the progress of our education programs participants. We can see if they apply the skills learned in theatre programs to other areas of learning and life.

But if we just count seating capacity without the assessment of audience experience and engagement aren’t we are measuring the effectiveness of marketing and public relations not the effect of the programming.

So, how do you evaluate in the impact. We need to identify what we need to learn about results to assess impact. We need to know the intended impact and search for the unintended impact. We have to talk with people before and after they attend performances or education programs. We have to discipline ourselves to track audience and participants for several years.

In practical terms to plan for such assessment, our staff (the entire staff from interns to, well, the Artistic Director and I) need to know WHY we are producing a particular play or why we are offering a particular education program. The staff needs to decide what we want the experience to be for each “client” from first contact to follow-up contact. The entire staff needs to participate fully in all aspects of programming and be able to talk about the programming if intimate detail and with great knowledge. If the entire staff is not fully versed in the programming – the audience never will be.

So with our crazy busy schedules what should we do? It is pretty obvious. The staff should talk about what we do with each other. We should talk about the community we live in on the local, national, and global level. If we have to schedule these discussions until we learn to do it organically we better start scheduling!