Nonprofit Groups Learn to Gauge Good Deeds

Agencies that help children, families or the poor may be filled with good intentions, but shrinking sources of funding--both nationally and locally--has reinforced the imperative that they now prove their programs yield results.

So how does a program that feeds people prove that the people it fed are better off? How does a teen pregnancy prevention program determine how much credit it gets if girls do not become pregnant or boys become fathers?

Such questions were confronted Thursday at the beginning of a three-day United Way of Orange County training session designed to teach agencies how to better demonstrate results.

United Way last year warned every organization seeking its money that it would more scrupulously look for program results, not just the number of people served.

About 220 representatives from nonprofit organizations, school systems and public agencies attended the first session, looking like students being introduced to “new math” or “phonics”--interested, but a little worried.

At Girls Inc., a national program with a chapter in Costa Mesa that focuses on the educational and social development of girls, teacher Sherri Taillon wondered how a recent science project meant to keep girls’ interest in science on par with that of boys would be measured.

Taillon recently took 13 students to the Bug Barn at the county fair. Not only were the seven girls urged to pick up the bugs, but they, like the six boys who also went, were rewarded with a ribbon for eating them.

“But what does that mean? And if I say three fewer girls ate the bugs, what would it show?” Taillon asked.

Conference organizers offered several answers. The process is nothing more than setting goals, targeting resources and asking if people are being helped--not just served, said Sid Gardner of the Center for Collaboration for Children at Cal State Fullerton, one of the session’s organizers. It is something he thinks everyone should be able to do.

“You can’t say what we do is so special and mysterious that it can’t be measured,” Gardner said. “Joe Taxpayer is going to say, ‘That’s fine, but you’ll have to get funding some other way than with my tax dollars.’ ”

Gauging success will be easier for some programs than others. Girls Inc., for example, is part of a national organization with a headquarters that does a considerable amount of analysis of program outcomes.

But officials at other nonprofit groups see a murky way ahead of them.

The Community Development Corp., for example, oversees the distribution of 12 million pounds of food each year to the county’s hungry. But how to measure the impact of a full stomach on the Orange County community? No longer will simply pointing to the number of people served be an acceptable measure of success, the agency’s director said, although it is an accomplishment to be noted.

“I know for a fact that a child who receives balanced meals from the time of infancy to age 5 will perform better in school,” said Buddy Ray, executive director of the CDC. “But that’s no longer going to be enough.

“We’d like to be able to look for measurements of success in the improved overall health of the county,” Ray said. “But what impact we make in that, if it really does improve, could be a statistical anomaly.”

Several agency directors also wondered if they would find themselves in an administrative tangle, required to provide foundations, governments and other funding sources with different types of results and thus forced to commit the greatest sin in the nonprofit world: spending excessive money on administration.

The success of an agency’s ability to show results is directly linked to how much money it will be getting in the future. Although California has yet to legislate outcome measurements, the federal government passed the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, which require agencies receiving federal dollars to show results. No success, no more money.

“This is about the new bottom line,” Gardner said. “We take money to help people, and there is a powerful argument that says we have to do a better job of measuring how well we help.”