I am just getting around to reading a newsletter Kyle Bowen from Museum as Progress sent out in early May about measuring things. Measuring what is valid and meaningful has been a longstanding topic on this blog so I read it with some interested, albeit belatedly.
In the newsletter Bowen cites ideas from Douglas Hubbard’s book, How to Measure Anything, indirectly echoing the lyrics of Rush’s, “Freewill”, “….if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
Though in this case it is more a matter of just because you aren’t choosing to measure it, doesn’t mean you aren’t making decisions. (my emphasis)
You’re already deciding which programs to fund, where to allocate staff time, and what to tell your board. You’re just deciding with institutional habit, and whoever argues most persuasively in the room. When you refuse to measure what you say matters most, you hand those decisions over to the things you can measure — attendance, revenue, social media impressions — by default. The metrics you’re comfortable with quietly become your actual priorities, regardless of what your strategic plan says. Not measuring means abandoning what matters, not protecting it.
Bowen was posting this in preparation for a discussion group of Museum as Progress members that was held in early June. He attached a chapter from Hubbard’s book as the basis for the discussion. One section where Hubbard covers the concept of sustainability piqued my interest.
Generally when you are writing grants and the funder asks about your plans to make the funded program sustainable, they want to know how the program will support itself in a year or so when they stop providing funding.
In a section of that chapter Hubbard talks about sustainability in terms of reducing the magnitude of a harmful event, or reducing the probability of it happening. The example he gives is the collapse of agriculture resulting in famine and poverty. He says that none of the negatives outcomes can be reduced to zero, but if you are able to reduce things like the number of people impacted, the duration of the crisis or prevent it from happening at all, those outcomes indicate an increased degree of sustainability due to your efforts.
Too often the context of the sustainability term used in funding seems to expect maintaining the program at the same level as it was when grant funding was available or growing it from there.
Angela Meleca made a post today that somewhat intersects with this idea. She gives the example of a non-profit that had been informed that a funder was shifting their priorities from supporting the arts to “workforce development, economic mobility, and stronger communities.”
As she was talking about the programs the organization ran, she noted that some of them were actually aligned with some of these priorities.
The program served students who had recently arrived in the United States and were attending an international public high school. Many entered the school year speaking little or no English… As the school year progressed, through weekly music participation, they rehearsed together, performed together, and learned together. Participation came with expectations: attend school, make academic progress, demonstrate positive behavior, serve the community.
By the spring concert, they were performing in English. The principal said something else was happening too — students who had once stayed separated were mixing at lunch, integrating more fully into school life. Attendance among participating students was 100 percent.
When the meeting ended, I told the development director what I thought I had just heard.
“You just described a workforce development program that teaches communication, collaboration and integration through singing.”
The development director responded that workforce development wasn’t part of their mission. Angela says her thought was that regardless of mission, that was the outcome the program was resulting in. (I would argue it aligns with stronger communities as well.)
There has long been a conversation in non-profit arts about the problem with trying to shoe horn your programs in to matching what a grant says it will support. Often this moves an organization off mission and may even increase the burden on organizational staff as people pick up new duties to meet the promise of the grant application.
Angela’s focus in this piece and others she has written is more aligned with becoming better at looking at the outcomes your organization are achieving and making the case for the value of your programs based on that versus trying to change the organization to meet a need.
Rather than trying to convince people that arts solve specific problems, the focus is more on saying what we already do well is a solution to the problem you seek to resolve.
Getting back to the original topic of this post, just because you aren’t measuring these outcomes doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Given the way funding priorities are shifting, it may be worth paying attention and evaluating how your core strengths might already be highly valued.
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