A Community Building Project is Successful When……?

By Martin Johnson

How would you finish the above sentence? Funders, community building organizations (CBOs) and residents – the three main players in community building activities – will likely answer differently. And if their answers are too different, what happens?

Over the past 24 months, the Success Measures Project (SMP) has worked to address this dilemma by establishing success measures for CBOs involved in economic development, housing development and community building (social capital) projects. The SMP organizing strategy focuses on CBO managers: How can they know if they are having the impact they seek?

 The SMP is a project of the Development Leadership Network (DLN), a national organization of community building practitioners. The project began after managers of organizations in the field held retreats and strategic discussions in the mid-90s and voiced a need for better evaluations and success measures. To launch the project, DLN members held six regional focus groups that tested the opinion, knowledge, and practices of stakeholders for evaluating community-based work in general and their own groups in particular. Armed with that information, the SMP honed its assumptions and developed baseline information for the project.

The SMP organized hundreds of CBO managers in ten regions of the country to develop and answer questions related to the effectiveness of their local community building environment. Each created a “picture” of the benefits that should accrue from “successful” programs, enabling participants to link and prioritize the multiple benefits of effective community building activities. They developed a list of 130 of the most powerful, broad indicator areas for economic development, housing development, and comprehensive community building programs. These were narrowed down to 44 indicators for a Draft Success Measures Project Guidebook, completed in November 1999. Field testing of the draft success measures is underway around the country, and the final Success Measures Project Guidebook will be published in fall 2000.

The next step is connecting those findings to the national project. Ultimately, important national data will be compiled and analyzed. By creating a national database of community development impacts, based on the priorities of communities and organizations, the SMP will broaden and deepen funders’, practitioners’, and community residents’ understanding of the value and achievements of community-based development programs.

Working with the McAuley Institute, the SMP is marketing the Draft Guidebook and training CBOs and their technical assistance providers on its use. The SMP is using the web to distribute the data and give multiple stakeholders in community building the ability to participate in the ongoing effort to effectively measure success in the field. The Success Measures Project is an exciting reminder of the importance of clearly identifying the things we care about. Only then, developing measures to determine our success in achieving them. Only then can we develop measures to determine our success in achieving them. The old adage – that which gets measured gets done – is as true as ever.
 

Martin Johnson is the president of Isles, Inc. and the chair or the Success Measures Project. To contact Martin Johnson, Susan Naimark, project director or others at the SMP, write to them at alane@developmentleadership.net. This article follows up on NFG Reports’ Spring 1999 cover story, “Exploring Evaluation.”
 

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