Debby Visser

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  Debby commented on the article | over 2 years ago

  Featuring Steve Wright from the Salesforce.com Foundation

  Hi Steve, Many thanks for this terrifically thoughtful, timely and galvanizing post.  For those of us in the community development arena striving to develop rigorous social outcome data in a bottom up, participatory way, your words ring especially true.  In response to both Wyva’s and Scott’s comments, our program – Success Measures at NeighborWorks America (www.nw.org/network/ps/successmeasures) -- should be of particular interest.  For the past ten years, in an effort driven by practitioners, in collaboration with funders and resident stakeholders, we’ve been able to develop and deploy a robust menu of common indicators and data collection tools to measure relevant community development outcomes including:  changes in people’s savings and asset accumulation behavior; capacity for collective action resulting from organizing and mobilizing local residents; the economic impact of commercial revitalization activities; improvements in the quality of life in underserved communities.  Through a combination of training, technical assistance and access to our web-based data system, nearly 200 community-based organizations have been able to incorporate outcome evaluation into their ongoing work. Our colleagues and community partners continue to be deeply engaged and invested in this process, aggregating and sharing data and using evaluation results to craft narratives that depict social change in realistic and compelling ways.  As a facilitator of their efforts in measuring hard-to-measure social change, we are awed by these organizations, large and small, and the extent to which they embrace serious outcome measurement and make it a very real part of their way of doing business.