Giving Compass' Take:

• This Stanford Social Innovation Review post explores how thinking about impact measurement on a spectrum can help organizations develop a clear idea of how or why their programs work.

• Are we making good use of data in our strategies? How can we create more precision in evidence-based approaches?

• Another key element of impact measurement: listening.

Would you buy something from Amazon if it only had one review? Or go to a restaurant that had just five reviews on Yelp? Maybe, but for many of us, it would feel like a risk. The more reviews, the more confident we tend to feel about the quality of a product or place. That’s because one review is an anecdote, but 50, 100, even 1,000 reviews is data.

If we decide what to buy and where to eat based on data, we should certainly use data to decide where to put resources toward solving social problems. But of course while using data to measure the social impact of a program sounds straightforward, if we misread data or give one data point too much weight, we can end up throwing money away on efforts that don’t create real change. Consider a nonprofit working with the local government to end homelessness in a community. If the nonprofit focuses only on individual stories and doesn’t measure the number of individuals it serves over time, the local government will never know whether the demand for homelessness services is increasing. Even worse, it won’t have the data to know if homelessness in the community is improving or intensifying, which can derail effective resource planning.

Making real social progress means using the right data — and lots of it — to evaluate outcomes, but caveats and misunderstandings abound, even among professionals in the impact measurement arena.

Read the full article about designing social impact measurement at Stanford Social Innovation Review.