What Impact? A Framework for Measuring the Scale & Scope of Social Performance

Alnoor  Ebrahim; V. Kasturi  Rangan

Article | California Management Review | Spring 2014

What Impact? A Framework for Measuring the Scale & Scope of Social Performance

Abstract

Organizations with social missions, such as nonprofits and social enterprises, are under growing pressure to demonstrate their impacts on pressing societal problems such as global poverty. This article draws on several cases to build a performance assessment framework premised on an organization's operational mission, scale, and scope. Not all organizations should measure their long-term impact, defined as lasting changes in the lives of people and their societies. Rather, some organizations would be better off measuring shorter-term outputs or individual outcomes. Funders such as foundations and impact investors are better positioned to measure systemic impacts.

Keywords: Nonprofit Organizations; Performance Evaluation;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Ebrahim, Alnoor, and V. Kasturi Rangan. "What Impact? A Framework for Measuring the Scale & Scope of Social Performance." California Management Review 56, no. 3 (Spring 2014): 118–141.

Last Mile Health is a non-profit organization that focuses on recruiting and training community health workers to reach remote rural communities with basic health services. Founded by Raj Panjabi, a Liberian who immigrated with his family to the United States during the Liberian Civil War, the case traces the founding and early years of Last Mile Health, before the organization is faced with a choice during the Ebola outbreak in 2014: should they pursue a significant amount of new funding to expand into other areas, or should they stay focused on training community health workers.

The case describes the 25-year transformation of Peabody Essex Museum, which was created in 1993 by the merger of two sub-scale predecessor cultural institutions, operating since 1799, in Salem, Massachusetts. Dan Monroe, its founding CEO, began a process of building the institution, which, when he arrived, had a budget of $3 million and an endowment of $23 million in 1993, as compared to a budget of $33 million and an endowment of $650 million in 2018. Monroe made changes in practically every aspect of the museum’s operations as PEM broke into the ranks of the top 15 museums in the U.S. All of this was happening at a time when museums in general had lost some 20% in visitation as a result of significant shifts in population demographics and what they understood by “cultural experience.” As Dan Monroe handed off the reins of an institution that had successfully run counter to trend to his successor in 2019, the trustees of the museum and its new CEO faced the challenge of how to keep the positive momentum going—and how potentially to reinvent PEM again for a rapidly changing world.

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What Impact? A Framework for Measuring the Scale & Scope of Social Performance

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