Measuring the unmeasurable

Although the tools you’re using are technical and measurable, fundamentally your underlying purpose will be human, broadly unquantifiable and very difficult to prove. You will need to find ways to make your measurements real, by collecting information about what’s happening in the real world.

You can do some of this via technology – such as by sending people follow-up questions and prompts by e-mail once they have used your site – and also by following up manually to build relationships with the people who are most active on your site. Quantitative data is great, but the true picture of the good you are doing might be obscured by too many stats. Try to collect stories from your community about real change happening as a result of your work. Publish them on a project blog so everyone can see them, and try to get quotes from users about the impact of the platform you’ve built on their lives.

Don’t underestimate how many ‘unmeasurable’ things can actually be measured in ingenious ways, particularly if you have money to spend. The best way to approach measuring success is to work out what, in an ideal world, you would like to measure, and then research the methods available for each one. Perhaps you’ll need to add technology to your platform to collect new data; perhaps you’ll need to survey your users or run focus groups; maybe you’ll even need to hire a separate company to research and evaluate your impact. As long as you know how valuable each piece of information is to you, you can put a maximum price on acquiring it and either go get it, or rule it out and try something else.

Finally, remember that stats are useful for demonstrating scale of impact, but it is often the human stories that bring it to life and show people what you’ve achieved. They can also be very useful tools for bringing in new users, reinforcing the sense of community and the value of the project, and attracting press and blog coverage. In the next chapter you’ll hear some of the stories about what other projects have achieved, and see how they demonstrate their success and impact.