Success Measures Project

Program managers may know better than anyone what their goals are, but they have typically been left out of the evaluation process. The Development Leadership Network's Success Measures Project aims to change that, by encouraging community-based organizations to take charge of evaluations. Started by a network of practitioners intent on being accountable to community residents, the project also aims to build a case for funders to greenlight internal self-evaluation by their grantees. 

Involving community groups organized through regional forums, Success Measures hopes self-evaluation will help programs show the less tangible benefits of what they do. When ISLES, a Trenton, NJ, organization that does as much of its evaluation in-house as possible, chose to judge its job training program with nontraditional indicators, it saw staff alter course from the outset. Since ISLES staff understood the evaluation would be based on whether participants had decent housing and could manage crises in their lives in addition to whether they were employed, they made sure to connect people to housing specialists or crisis counselors. "Once they knew we were measuring such a broad number of indicators, they knew they had to minister to the whole person, says ISLES Executive Director Marty Johnson. "The majority of things that community builders care about and think are being done through their work are not being captured at all in typical evaluations."

Success Measures also hopes to build understanding of the trials of running programs in the country's most hard-pressed communities. If your only way to measure output is through the production units counted by traditional evaluators - houses, jobs, community gardens - you're going to go where you can get the most unit productions for the dollar," Johnson says, as opposed to digging in for the long haul in the poorest neighborhoods.

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