Martha’s Table has never lacked for a good story to tell about its impact in the community. Over the last four years, CEO Patty Stonesifer has helped multiply the impact of those stories with hard evidence.
Ms. Stonesifer’s staff and board members say she has helped foster an organizational culture that values the importance of using data and measurement to rethink many aspects of the charity’s work for the better.
This emphasis on using data to show impact has helped boost giving: Revenues to support Martha’s Table’s programs have grown from $7.5 million in 2013 to $10.1 million in 2016.
“Patty did a great job with coming in and helping to refine our message around what we do and how we do it, and our ultimate outcomes,” said Ellis Carr, the board’s treasurer.
Along with two full-time staff members devoted to data, Ms. Stonesifer helped the organization hone in on which measures and indicators will help it better track success overtime. The data has also informed the charity’s major decisions, like choosing where to build its new headquarters and rethinking how to raise money from the Washington community.
“Having that foundation has allowed all of us to refine our message and to be super clear about what we’re after,” Mr. Carr said. “It was a very different way of looking at it, helping us be intellectually honest with ourselves around the impact that we are having.”
Ann Dunn, assistant director of data and evaluation, describes the use of data as a “feedback loop,” where the information they are analyzing gets back into the hands of parents, or of teachers and other staff members, informing how they approach their work. “We do a lot of ‘show, don’t tell,” she says, sharing concrete evidence that programs are succeeding or not.
And that’s necessary for these efforts to be meaningful and embraced by the staff.
If you want to create an organizational culture built on metrics, you can’t overwhelm people, Ms. Stonesifer said last September at The Chronicle’s inaugural Philanthropy NEXT conference. It works best when you encourage people to more closely focus on the data that matters to their specific, everyday jobs and activities, instead of on the big-picture goals like reducing food insecurity.
“That big systems change is up to the leaders, not staff at program level,” she said.
Initially, Martha’s Table went from nearly no data to far too much, before eventually settling on the key questions for which the organization needed answers. With just two people on its staff of about 90 devoted full-time to data, Ms. Stonesifer said, “it’s everybody’s responsibility to consider what data is important and how to use it.”
