Glossary

Dashboard

An internal report used to communicate a collection of data to an organization’s management team in order to provide periodic snapshots of the organization’s overall progress in relation to past results and future goals. All performance measurement systems should include a management dashboard, which enables an organization’s leadership team to track overall organizational performance. Many organizations also choose to create program-level dashboards to track individual programs or internal areas, such as marketing or human resources, at a more detailed level.

Indicator

A unit of measurement, or metric, for assessing the short- and long-term results of an organization’s programs and activities. To keep performance measurement as simple as possible, we focus on the three major categories of indicators:

1. Organizational health indicators provide critical insight into your organization’s capacity to carry out its mission. Such indicators include total revenue and expenses; the percentage of the expense budget covered by committed revenue; the percentage of your income sources that you consider renewable and reliable; and the distribution of your income between foundation funding, individual donors, earned income, and other sources. Organizational health indicators should also assess the size and quality of your team by measuring the number of staff and volunteers, in addition to staff and volunteer satisfaction. Many organizations also decide to track their effectiveness in implementing new plans or meeting organizational goals.
2. Program performance indicators focus primarily on your organization’s activities and the outputs, or the short-term results, produced by those activities. Depending on the nature of the organization’s work, program performance indicators could include the number of individuals enrolled in a given program, members in an association, partner organizations, individuals engaged through advocacy efforts, or individuals reached through a communications campaign. Many organizations also find it valuable to gather demographic information on their beneficiaries or other key stakeholders. In addition, program performance indicators cover program quality, such as satisfaction level of beneficiaries, program efficiency, and program costs.
3. Social and economic impact indicators allow you to assess your organization’s outcomes, its longer-term progress in meeting its mission and realizing its vision of success. For example, an organization aimed at getting high school students into college would want to know what percent of the program’s graduates go on to enroll in a college or university. Depending on its mission and vision, the organization might also decide to track how many of those students complete their degrees or even the types of careers those graduates pursue and their average salaries. Social and economic impact indicators may also measure the costs of achieving an organization’s outcomes. Additionally, this category includes indicators that assess the larger, systemic impact of your work. For instance, you might choose to measure how your approach has impacted the work of other organizations in your field or new stakeholders that you have helped to bring into the effort to address your target social problem.

Mission

A description of an organization’s purpose, including its target beneficiaries, the activities it conducts in order to address its target social problem, and the outcomes it expects to achieve.

Output

The direct, short-term results of an organization’s programs and other activities.

Outcome

The effect of an organization’s programs and activities on its target social problem. Outcomes tend to be much longer-term results than outputs.

Performance Measurement System

A measurement methodology drawn from the private sector that enables an organization to assess its own performance and use the results to make improvements to its model.

Report Card

A periodic external report that contains highlights from an organization’s internal dashboards and facilitates sharing data and establishing accountability with social impact investors and other stakeholders.

Social Impact

The difference between outcomes and the baseline of what would have happened anyway had your program not intervened.

Social Innovation

The process of finding, honing, and testing potentially transformative approaches to social problems.

Vision of Success

A description of how the world will be different if the organization succeeds in carrying out its mission.

Did we miss anything? Are there other words you would like to see defined here? Email us at performancemeasurement@rootcause.org.