Impact Measurement Quotes

The real metric of success isn't the size of your bank account. It's the number of lives in whom you might be able to make a positive difference.

In order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes. In order to fail, there has to be a measurement system. And that's the problem with most philanthropy - there's no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation.

Intervention giving is emotional and the results are measurable.

To make a name for myself, I feel it's important to do that before I go anywhere else. Impact have given me the platform and the exposure to do that.

Measure the success of your days by the lives touched vs the hours passed.

I've been asked a great deal about the influence I've had with my work and it's impossible to say, you know.

It's hard to get money to support your [non-profit] organization if you have no evidence. It's very much like the acting business: You need an agent and manager so you can get a job to get resources, but you can't get an agent and a manager unless people see your work.

The spread of online information isn't just good for charities. It's also good for donors. You can go to a site like Charity Navigator, which evaluates nonprofits on their financial health as well as the amount of information they share about their work.

Impact investing can be a powerful instrument of change.

Recruiting is the hardest part of any business, but in charity, it is 10 times harder.

There are two main organizations that rate charities. They look at their finances and decide whether they are giving enough to the causes they claim to focus on. Something like 80 or 90% of their money actually goes to a charitable purpose.

There's nothing that can replace quality programs in a non-profit.

The next time you're looking at a charity, don't ask about the rate of their overhead; ask about the scale of their dreams - their Apple-, Google-, Amazon-scale dreams - how they measure their progress toward those dreams, and what resources they need to make them come true, regardless of what the overhead is.

One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it.

Most philanthropists want to be effective altruists. But the problem isn't intention: it's measurement. Unlike financial investing, which has reporting standards, audit processes, and educational requirements, social investing is notoriously tricky to evaluate.

I was encouraged to break all the rules but to take the best of philanthropy, the best of investing, and the best of development finance, and experiment with new ways to create this venture capital model of using philanthropy to back patient capital investments, and then build solutions that were measured in terms of the kind of impact and change they were making on people's lives and in the world, not just on the financial return.

There's a lot of complacency in philanthropy. People figure organizations are trying to do good, and that's enough, even if the results aren't there. But that's wasteful and inefficient. It crowds out better programs.

Sometimes it is a way of controlling others, including family members, because you don't know how to connect to them in any other way. Money can also serve as a scorecard to indicate how well you are doing, the impact you are having, if you are winning.

To ensure food security for all, we should be clear about the definition of the problem, the precise index of measuring impact and the road map to achieve the goal.