You should take time to look back on your goals and plans, examine the data you collected, review metrics, and think critically about the indicators of your success. Measuring the work associated with a given organizing effort is a crucial component to driving learning, positioning future efforts for success, and understanding how to talk about impact with different stakeholders. High quality data analysis can guide evidence of growth beyond the intuition of staff, making it possible to tell a more complete story about the impact that an organization or effort is having within their community.
There are many different aspects of organizing work that can be measured, and each will provide different information and value. These fall into four categories: inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes. Revisit the Identifying your Effort Worksheet, Field Plan, or any internal planning documents to help identify these aspects.
- Inputs: Usually includes the human, financial, organizational, and community resources a program can put toward its work, such as the number of volunteers willing to participate in a phone bank or the budget for providing food and drinks at events.
- Activities: Can be thought about as the processes, events, and actions that are implemented to drive results. For example, the actual act of running a phone bank or hosting an event (in-person or virtual) is an activity.
- Outputs: These are the direct product of activities, and include things like the number of newly recruited volunteers after a phone bank effort or the number of attendees at an event.
- Outcomes: Are the intended and unintended changes that occur in organizations, communities, and systems. This might include a city council changing a policy after being pressured by constituents who were organized to attend meetings and events. There are short-term and long-term outcomes, together they can produce your desired impact.
Create the following charts to identify each aspect in your effort so that you can identify which data is most important to pull for your reflection analyses.
| Input | Tracked in Organizer | Quantitative Data to Pull |
|---|---|---|
| Example: Money spent conducting phone banking outreach efforts | No | How much was spent to conduct phone banking outreach efforts throughout the effort? |
| Activity | Tracked in Organizer | Quantitative Data to Pull |
|---|---|---|
| Example: Calls dialed for phone bank | Yes | How many calls were made? |
| Output | Tracked in Organizer | Quantitative Data to Pull |
|---|---|---|
| Example: Voter registration commitments during phone bank | Yes | How many people committed to register to vote during the phone bank? |
| Outcome | Tracked in Organizer | Quantitative Data to Pull |
|---|---|---|
| Example: Legislation signed into law | No | Votes for an against from lawmakers |
Note: All organizations can measure inputs, activities, and outputs, and they are all important to understanding your impact. Outcomes, however, are typically the most difficult to measure, yet they are also the most important. Measuring outcomes creates the best opportunity for determining whether or not a particular campaign or effort is effective, giving organizations a chance to improve how they plan and execute their work when and where necessary.
Creating Communities for Data Reflection
Step 1: Using a chart like the one below, consider the inputs, activities, and outputs from your effort that were tracked using Organizer. Using this chart, list each action that you want to analyze, where it lives in Organizer, and what questions you have that can be answered by pulling data found in Organizer.
| Type of Action/ Outreach | Name in Organizer | Question for Analysis | Fields/Data Points to Include |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Example:
|
Voter Registration Phone Bank
|
How many people who committed to register actually registered? | Those who answered “yes” to survey question “Do you commit to vote” Their voter registration status Their voter registration date |
Step 2: Build communities in Organizer
Use the outreach activity and other data points identified above to build communities that will help you analyze your effort efficacy and scope. For detailed instructions on how to build a community in Organizer, visit an article on creating a community, or reach out to your Partnerships Success Manager for support.
Export
Consider the segments/lists you have created for data analysis. Which ones must be exported for use in an external tool (i.e. Excel, Google Sheets) or for external reporting? Use the steps listed the article on how to Export Data to export the necessary information from Organizer.
Resources
View the Organizing and Advocacy Playbook as a PDF
Background Information
Advocacy Action Plan Phase-Learning
Advocacy Action Plan Phase-Planning
Advocacy Action Plan Phase-Implementation
Advocacy Action Plan Phase-Execution
Advocacy Action Plan Phase-Reflection