The system rewards not measuring
Two organisations apply to the same funder. One measures nothing and tells a good story. The other measures, and sees what falls short. Who gets the money?
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Picture two organisations that help young people into work. Both apply to the same funder for an extension.
The first sends a report full of photos. Forty workshops, a hundred participants, and one young person who now has a permanent job. It reads well. It says nothing about the other ninety-nine.
The second organisation did measure. It writes that half of the young people dropped out after three weeks. It found out why. The workshops were in the daytime, and that is exactly when the young people often had a side job. The programme has now changed. Whether that works, it will know in a year.
A committee reads twenty applications in one afternoon. Which report convinces them? We often see it go the way you would expect. The money goes to the story that is complete, not to the organisation that learned the most.
Nobody is doing anything wrong here. The first organisation works just as hard. The funder wants to spend its money well. But together they keep something in place: not measuring is safer than measuring.
At TechPort in IJmuiden we saw what that can cost. A startup we supported there could not raise funding in time. Its data was not in order in time.
That is in the system. Funders pay for delivery, and rarely for learning. In a budget, measuring is often not a line item. A report asks for numbers, not for what went wrong. And whoever measures honestly gives someone else a reason to say no.
Not measuring has a cost too, only the bill comes later. We work with five reasons to measure impact: discover, lead, improve, engage and account. For each of them, not measuring costs something different.
Without figures you don’t discover what is really needed. You don’t know whether young people are looking for work, or need something else first. A board leads on gut feeling, and on the story of whoever tells it best. A programme runs for years without anyone knowing whether it works. Then there is nothing to improve either. Young people who drop out stay invisible, so nobody engages them to ask why. And accounting becomes a report full of activities, like the one from the first organisation.
In family businesses and social enterprises it is no different. The mission is clear and the customers are happy. Until a bank, a large customer or the next generation asks what the company means for the region. Then it turns out that nobody kept track.
In our work we start small, with one question and the figures that are already there. We work with organisations that dare to write down what went wrong. And with funders and boards that want to read it.
The question we keep asking is a simple one. What would happen if the second organisation got the extension?
