We’re continuing our series on performance management by handing the mic back to Megan Ondr-Cooper of CASA of St. Louis. This week, Megan will share the questions she and her teammates asked along their journey toward a meaningful performance management system.
As Sarah shared in her post last week, performance management is a system and mindset. Therefore, it needs more than the right technology or knowledge. (However, there are a number of great resources out there that describe the skills, team, and action steps you need to get started.) And it requires more than the passion of just one data nerd.
For an organization to build and sustain a meaningful performance management system, it must have a particular combination of organizational attitudes, values, and motivations. Some call these “requirements” for performance management. For our team at CASA of St. Louis, many of these attributes evolved throughout our planning process as the result of key “lightbulb moments.” This week, I want to share some of the questions and considerations that illuminated our path toward a meaningful performance management system.
“What do we want to know?”
Before starting with performance management, our data mostly reflected what our funders wanted to know about our program. It never really occurred to us to consider how we could use data to answer our most important questions and inform our decisions. Asking questions to spark curiosity helped us to start thinking evaluatively and identify data we could use internally.
Our funders are interested in the outcomes of the children for whom we advocate, as are we, of course! But we have another customer, the judges in front of whom we advocate, who determine the child’s placement, which is the ultimate outcome. Funders never asked, but we realized we wanted to know how judges perceive our advocacy and if they use the information we provide to inform their decisions. Beyond reporting requirements, our data collection plans began to reflect our priorities. This thinking resulted in the setting of not just outcome goals for our program, but goals and measures to inform our learning and to better tell our program’s story.
“What’s in our lane?”
As most mission and vision statements suggest, nonprofits have big dreams for our programs. And like most service providers, we at CASA want the world for the children and youth we serve. However, this process helped us recognize that outcomes are not meant to reflect your hopes and dreams. Outcomes should reflect the reasonable and feasible results of your program.
In thinking about our intended outcomes, we considered those we can influence and for which can we realistically hold ourselves accountable. For example, while we are passionate about children maintaining connections to their home communities, we are limited in our ability to ensure this through court advocacy. Thus, it became a quality goal, which we will monitor for our own learning and improvement, but we will not hold ourselves accountable for achieving it. Going through the process of identifying practice- and research-informed pathways of change helped us identify the levers we could reasonably pull in order to create change.
“What does quality look like?”
In the past, our measurement was limited to outputs (counts) and some outcomes. However, through the process of thinking about what we wanted our program to be and how we might manage to outcomes, we identified a missing piece in our measurement – quality. We wanted to deliver quality advocacy, but we hadn’t considered what quality meant or how we might measure it.
To manage quality, we developed indicators of quality service delivery, fidelity to our model, and customer satisfaction. We created surveys to assess how the youth we advocate for feel about our services. We considered what and how we needed to document our efforts in order to measure fidelity to our program model. Equipped with data about all the elements that influence performance, these “data beyond outcomes” (as Sarah calls them) will increase our chances of achieving our outcomes.
Bottom Line
Performance management is about more than just collecting a few new data points and creating a dashboard. It involves clearly defining success and having the information you need to manage programs to improve results. Performance management is characterized by evaluative thinking and requires honest appraisals of your program model – what you do, why you do it, and how you do it.
As always love the examples you provide to demonstrate how this looks in practice!