Are We Asking the Right Questions?

It is the day before your board strategy session. The finance staff is polishing off statistics to answer the board’s questions. Are we financially sound? Are we operating within budget? How many people did we serve compared with prior years? How many of them are repeat users? How many newspaper articles and television stories have covered the organization’s work?

In her book, Change Your Questions, Change Your Life, Marilee Goldberg Adams argues that to a great extent the questions we ask of ourselves determine our behavior. What if we were to ask different questions? Would the end result be different?

I thought of Marilee’s book when I attended a conference in Richmond, Virginia today. Leslie Crutchfield, author of Forces for Good, conducted a three-hour seminar. Amid her excellent observations about the six habits of highly effective nonprofits, she noted the difference between outputs and outcomes. Are we really interested in how many people we served (an output)? Or, do we care more about whether we changed their lives for the better (an outcome)?

By way of example, is the best measure of a good food bank how much food they delivered? Or, should we be asking about the degree to which their overall efforts have reduced hunger in our community? Beyond what the food bank accomplishes, don’t we care about whether they are leveraging their own efforts by engaging other nonprofits, private industry and government to solve the problem of hunger?

In thinking about successful and measurable examples, my mind turns to the Richmond SPCA. Notably, when the Richmond SPCA developed its dynamic facility expansion in 2002, their measure of success transcended numbers of spay/neuters or adoptions that could be accomplished at the facility. Instead, they aspired to make Richmond a “no kill” community by 2008. Robin Starr, CEO, frequently appears in the local media and in the halls of local government to influence public opinion and public policy, dramatically broadening the impact of the Richmond SPCA’s own work. Read Robin’s plan, cited above, and you will see what I mean.

As givers, are we asking the right questions? Are the charities we support making our community a better place? Do they have an expansive vision that inspires? Have they demonstrated they have the capacity to lead partners in nonprofits, private industry and government to accomplish their goals? And, if the answer to these questions is “yes,” then can we help them in more ways than just writing a check?

Change the questions; change the answers. Think about it. It’s a powerful concept.

Robert Thalhimer