Nonprofits, particularly direct services organizations, might consider measuring their impact on three dimensions -- breadth, depth, and durability. But what should agile innovation and social impact organizations consider?

I would argue that determining how to measure impact depends on your “endgame”, that is the specific role that your nonprofit intends to play in the overall solution to the social problem, once it has proven the effectiveness of the core model or intervention.

ORGANIZATIONAL PATHWAYS
For example, if you are intending to gain impact from your work by expanding on what other organizations can do, you might measure impact as…
🔶The extent to which your work is distributed through existing platforms;
🔶The breadth, depth, and durability of those distribution platforms;
🔶How your technical assistance and training have enabled others to adopt and scale your work;
🔶How the most impactful parts of your solution are unbundled and how those parts achieve scale; and
🔶How your use of technology has enabled you to expand access to your work at a lower cost.

FIELD PATHWAYS
Education systems, juvenile justice, and child welfare systems, to name just a few, operate at a massive scale but don’t necessarily achieve a massive impact.
If you are intending to gain impact from your work by changing systems, then you might consider impact measures such as…

🔶 How you have coalesced and moved a constellation of organizations toward a shared target;
🔶The extent to which you and your partners are effective at changing a critical component of the system;
🔶The extent to which you and your partners are able to change the conversation, demonstrate an effective change management process and inject new leadership; and
🔶The extent to which you have influenced policy at various levels of the system.

❓Now you: Do you have field-building goals as well as organizational goals?

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