The Importance of Outcome-Based Evaluation for Faith Based Organizations

FBOs (Faith Based Organization) serve the needs of others and historically have been the supportive backbone of social services programming, emergency aid, and outreach assistance to needy people and communities.  Like many nonprofit groups, FBOs want to improve their programs, strengthen their business plans and relationships, appeal to communities, evaluate their group’s goals and organization, and market their successes.   With the earnest intention of  FBOs to bring about change and have successful outcomes, measuring that success in a way that will provide meaningful data to those involved is essential.

How FBOs Can Measure a Program’s Effectiveness

Employing Outcome-Based Evaluations (OBE) can help FBOs tell their story in ways that will appeal to their stakeholders and the general public. The use of OBE is an organizational skill-set and discipline that delivers this accountability.  It is versatile and designed to meet the unique needs of an FBO’s mission, program, and culture.  This tailor made evaluation is a program specific form of evaluation.  OBE relies on program personnel to identify the outcomes that meet the real needs of their clients.  It also evokes from directors and staff what data they should track, what outcomes require measuring, and what resources must be provided to assess results.  OBE recognizes the uniqueness of each FBO and is able to build upon its goals in an exclusive way.  By using its own criteria, an organization uses OBE to monitor its own effectiveness.  This makes OBE totally compatible with each FBO’s mission and calling.  Used consistently it empowers FBOs to move steadily ahead to attain its program goals.  Meanwhile, OBE serves FBO’s management needs and organization in the following ways:

• Maintains the organization’s unique mission for directors and managers.
• Results in goal-setting and tracking activities utilized in reaching the goals, providing data useful to management in understanding real costs and staffing needs.
• Clarifies criteria for referring needy clients to other agencies that may better meet their needs.
• Aids in allocating resources by identifying programs' strengths and weaknesses, allowing FBOs to expand resources to highly effective programs, and apply remedies to others.
• Streamlines budgeting and strategic planning processes.
• Presents an important check on whether or not a program is still viable and necessary.

 The Fundamentals of OBE

The heart of the OBE process is the identification of desired outcomes-what changes, specifically, are sought in clients?  These outcome changes are behaviors, skills, or attitudes that a client is being helped to achieve.  It is what the FBO seeks to accomplish.  These outcomes are in terms of what the client does, not expressed in what the FBO does.  The discipline of communicating these defined outcomes in measurable terms is helpful to the whole organization-staff, volunteers, board members, and stake holders-as a way to understand precisely what the FBO is all about.  Outcomes must be observable and written into concrete and understandable descriptions of what an organization desires to achieve.  Once outcomes are formulated, more descriptive, measurable statements called “indicators” specify change or improve skills, knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, or even life status depending on the needs and intentions of clients. 

For example, several small, church-based, marriage programs in South Carolina claimed that their program’s mission was for “husbands and wives to turn their hearts to one another”.  While the organization’s cause is in the right place, it did little to describe the actual results they wanted.  Prompted with OBE training to explain what they meant, the leaders clarified their goals with the following three outcomes: “husbands and wives will become emotionally involved with each other”, “husbands and wives will spend time together”, and “husbands and wives will become the spiritual leaders in their home.”  Next, indicators were developed to provide a focus for each of these outcomes in more measurable and concrete terms. If the outcome was: “husbands and wives will spend time together”, the indicator would be something like this, “husbands and wives will spend two hours together every day.”  Thus, these outcome indicators can be to change or improve skills, knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, or even life status depending upon the client’s needs and intentions.

The Role of OBEs and Funding

Relying on funding is essential to FBO programming, organization, and future service in communities.  The competition for funding is quite intense.  FBOs have been adapting to new accountability methods set by their donors: private and public, pious, and secular.  This movement has been led by large foundations supporting social services such as The United Way.  Since the 1980’s, many nonprofits and social services have been using OBE to measure and enhance their service delivery programs.  Ever since the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act in 1993, the United States Congress used outcome based results to ensure that federal agencies were delivering their designated programs what Congress wanted them to achieve.  With more accountability for FBOs, federal agencies are now requiring outcome data from their subcontractors and grantees.  Donors who have invested greatly want to learn how their money is being used and if their FBO is achieving what they promised.  These concrete measures of success also make a desirable tool for attracting donors and building support from the public. On the other hand, FBOs want to communicate and share their achievements and successes to their donors.   Donors can feel assured that they are sponsoring a meaningful cause in a worthwhile organization that is prepared to be accountable when FBOs use OBEs.

The Benefits of OBE

• OBE provides FBOs with tools to assess the effectiveness of their programs step-by-step.  It allows management teams to continuously gage their focus and to improve their program services.
•  OBE allows an organization to measure the different components of a program.  This data provides management and boards with tools for making well informed decisions.
• Donors will be very content with the accountability and the clarity of data.
• OBE increases the ability of FBOs to state very clearly what they do, and how they do it with a focus on results rather then process.  It provides the information for clean and honest reporting of successes gained.  In addition, it will open the doors for newsworthy outlets.
• The faith community at large will increasingly learn how to develop FBOs that are true to their unique calling, yet are open and accountable to their donors.

Conclusion

When FBOs use OBEs they can convey important information and the very powerful stories that show how essential their program was to specific individuals.  By doing this, they are more likely able to gain support in their communities as well as attract potential donors.  The implementation of OBEs helps program directors know what is working and enables them to make the necessary adjustments to ensure the people in need are being served in the best way.   Ultimately, FBOs who use OBEs leads to greater faithfulness in a program’s mission and improves the performance of everyone that is concerned:  volunteers, directors, boards, and stake holders.