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United Way invests for measurable results and is committed to reporting those results to the community.
Like most nonprofits, we can report several important things about our investment in the community. We can tell how many programs we support (more than 50 each year) and how many people are served by those nonprofits (more than 20,000 each year).
But what matters most is how lives are actually change by those services. Those 50 programs work very hard at serving the people in our community, but did it impact the community in our priority areas the way we intended? It’s wonderful that a local after-school program served 50 children for more than 200 days last year and that they did it very cost effectively, but were children’s lives actually changed in ways that matter?
The answer is “definitely yes!” We know this because our volunteer leadership evaluates our investments in the community based on an outcomes measurement system that asks programs to track not only what services they provided but also what happened as a result. They look to see if a program is able to measure outcomes, is collecting and reporting data and is achieving impact in our priority areas.
As a consequence, our volunteer leadership can say with confidence that United Way is investing in what matters - getting restuls in our work to improve lives and change conditions in our priority areas.
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