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LatestFrom Guessing to Knowing
We do best when we let communities define and direct their own “positive outcomes.”
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Moving From Pass/Fail to Continuous Progress
It’s hard to fully understand the effects of interventions that aim to address several life challenges at once. But it can help to transition from all-or-nothing assessments to more incremental measures.
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Education Decision Makers Need More Timely, Actionable Data
Although we are ultimately most interested in long-term life outcomes for students, to achieve them education leaders will need a new focus on shorter-term, intermediate measures of success.
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Measuring Outcomes to Improve Social Services
Funders can support positive change by backing proven, replicable interventions and new measurement tools that help draw the connection between services offered and results achieved.
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Making the Case for Evidence-Based Decision-Making
Evidence-based practice has great potential to improve social outcomes, but only if we do a better job marketing and adapting it to address the specific problems at hand.
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Getting More Than You Pay For With Pay-For-Success
In laying the groundwork for stronger cross-sector collaboration and outcomes-focused approaches, pay-for-success projects in Silicon Valley are reaping benefits far beyond the success they’ve agreed to invest in.
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From Family Data to Neighborhood Outcomes
By offering better early support for struggling families, child welfare services can reduce the need for more serious interventions down the line and improve the wellbeing of whole neighborhoods.
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Measurement & Evaluation
Defining Positive Outcomes
Increasingly, social change initiatives in the United States are pursuing not just program outputs but positive outcomes in the lives of the people they aim to help. However, determining whether a program is actually changing people’s lives can be extremely complex work. Positive outcomes can mean very different things to different people. Government officials, social entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders, and impact investors all have unique expectations, and a shared definition of positive outcomes may not be possible.
Still, for social innovators implementing models like pay-for-success, picking apart these challenges and complexities is a worthwhile endeavor that can encourage organizations to learn and improve. A learning mindset, in turn, can increase the number of people served, improve program effectiveness, and create lasting systems change.
In this series, produced in partnership with Third Sector Capital Partners, contributors from a variety of sectors will discuss how we might define positive outcomes, whether on the level of individuals or in terms of macro-level policy. A common theme throughout the series is the belief that data and measurement are core components of any effort to truly improve the lives of people in need.