Hooray
So often it is the "glorious mundane" that offers the best lessons for our work to improve the quality of life in Kansas City. A rather mundane Saturday night this past weekend is the source for my latest reminder that keeping it simple is really the key!
"Program outcomes" has been a focus for so many of us. How does a nonprofit measure the success of its work? How can a donor know for sure that a charitable investment is paying off? Do we need fancy metrics and formulas to prove that a program is successful?
Our three-year-old surely gets the prize for the pickiest eater in our family--and maybe the world! Her preferred diet, if we'd let her, would be to eat Cheetos for every meal, topped off with maybe three Apple Jacks and half a chicken nugget if we are lucky. So we spend many evenings trying everything we can think of to get her to eat. Bribing her with Cheetos, covering vegetables in ketchup, doing silly dances about eating . . . it gets ridiculous, not to mention exhausting.
So on Saturday night (following a restaurant attempt foiled two minutes after we were seated due to two screaming children), we returned to our kitchen and gathered around a random assortment of what was left in the pantry. As we began the routine of trying to get Lindy to eat, our six-year-old spontaneously suggested that we shout "hooray" after Lindy ate each bite of cheese or wheat bread. Amazingly, it worked! With a little bit of praise (well, okay, a lot of praise), she ate a reasonably good meal.
Was there some complicated formula to this method of ensuring good nutrition? I doubt it--just a kindergartner's common sense. And the outcome was measurable--we had an empty plate to prove it.
Next time you log on to DonorEdge® to see what your favorite organization has been up to, be sure to check out the program outcomes section of the profile. The questions are designed to be simple, yet effective, to give you the best information possible about the return on your investment. Hooray!
