Are we making progress? Identifying organizational outcomes 

When GuideStar and Foundation Center merged to become Candid in 2019, we created a 2030 vision as our guiding light. This remains our north star for how Candid will help enable the social sector to tackle the critical challenges and opportunities of our time. But we also knew that while our vision was aspirational, it was too abstract to guide our day-to-day priorities. To measure our progress, we realized we would need to determine the specific outcomes we seek to achieve. 

Over the past two years, we’ve worked with our board to create an outcomes framework, or a way to measure and demonstrate the impact of what Candid offers. We wanted to hold ourselves accountable for answering the question: How would the world tangibly and measurably look different if we’re successful? It’s not sufficient that we have more data, more users, or even more people using that data. Rather, we realized that what matters is that “more resources go to the places that do the most good”—our overarching outcome. In short, we sought to connect use of our data and our tools to more good being manifested in the world.  

Defining clear outcomes is important—but not easy. My hope is that discussing our journey, along with many lessons learned, might be helpful to others seeking to better articulate ways to measure their own progress toward achieving their mission. 

Why outcomes matter 

As a nonprofit that serves other nonprofits (rather than providing direct services), the impact we make is typically indirect. This can make it challenging to define success. But without defining the outcomes we seek, our mission to “get you the information you need to do good” is insufficient to drive priorities, make key decisions, and measure our progress. 

In Candid’s early days, the lack of defined outcomes led to inconsistent priorities, which were not always fully aligned with our mission. Without a way to measure success against our mission, we tended to focus on the things we could measure: more data, more users, and more revenue. For example, we had a big focus on quantity of data. However, more data only matters if users want it, use it, and do more good as a result. What we need is not to provide more data, but to strengthen the data we already have by improving data quality, adding enhancements, or deriving valuable insights.  

Similarly, we had a big focus on increasing the number of users we serve, with the assumption that more users equate to more impact. Yet, who those users are matters much more than just the numbers. 

Our lesson learned? Start with the end goal in mind.  

Defining outcomes 

With these learnings, we worked with a board task force to identify the key outcomes that would indicate Candid was making progress toward our mission. To drill down more precisely on how we ensure “more resources go to the places that do the most good,” we further defined three pillars: contributing to the social sector becoming more efficient, effective, and equitable (the three Es). Specifically: 

• Efficient: reduce the high transaction cost (at the opportunity cost of doing more mission-aligned work) for nonprofits to identify funders, apply for grants, and report on their results. Metric: Nonprofits spend less time and money per dollar raised. 

• Effective: provide funders with better tools and data to make good choices about which organizations they aim to fund (think putting a stake through the heart of the overhead myth). Metric: Nonprofits share organizational effectiveness data on their Candid nonprofit profiles, and funders use this data to make decisions. 

• Equitable: ensure there is a level playing field for all nonprofits to access funding. Metric: Nonprofits led by people of color receive their fair share of grant dollars. 

We will rely on our extensive data collection—from 990 data, to contributed data, to our ever-growing demographic data collection—to track these metrics. 

Where we’re headed 

Our three Es not only enable us to measure our progress, but more importantly, guide both our strategy and day-to-day decision making to ensure we’re always steering toward our vision. By keeping our eye on the prize, we’re constantly challenging ourselves to invest in initiatives that will move the needle such as Demographics via Candid (efficient, equitable) and Go for Gold (equitable). We’ll also begin collecting data on fiscally sponsored projects (efficient, effective) soon, and next year we’ll define organizational effectiveness metrics on Candid nonprofit profiles (effective). 

We hope that by sharing the learnings from our own journey, we can shine a light on how clearly articulated outcomes and metrics can help nonprofits deliver on their missions.