by Meg Davis

After advising other organizations on how to create their own strategic plans, Asia Catalyst sat down in a conference room on Sunday with ten or so of our best friends and engaged in the annual exercise to plan our own work. Every year, we seem to find this a little more difficult, as our projects multiply and become more complex.

Fortunately, we had on hand our new board advisor, John Santoleri, who stopped us and said, “I don’t have a sense of the cost and benefit of each program — how much time each one takes, versus how hard or easy it is to raise funds for that program, versus the impact each program has.” With his help, we created a form to track just that.

The chart John had us improvise on the spot rates each project according to a few different values. At the time we weren’t sure how to grade projects (using words, letters or numbers?). If I was starting it again now, I think I would rate our projects on a scale from 1 to 6, since we have six projects at the moment. The indicators we used were:

– how much time (in staff hours per week over a number of months) we spend on each project;

– how easy or hard it is to raise funds for each project (a score of 1 means “really easy to raise funds for this”, and a score of 6 means “almost impossible to raise funds”);

– how successful we have been in meeting our goals for each project (a score of 1 stands for “all goals met”, a score of 6 stands for “no goals met”);

– the impact of each project; you could measure this through numbers of people trained, or numbers of visitors to a website, feedback you’ve received from project participants, etc. (here a score of 1 would mean “high impact”, and a score of 6 means “low impact”).

This is a simple, quick way to evaluate how well you are using your resources. We found the results of this fascinating — among other things, we realized once again how overstretched our staff and volunteers are. It helped us to look at our projects in a new way and to think out loud about whether or not the energy and fundraising effort we spend on certain activities are worth it. We’re still mulling over the results and discussing where next year’s plans will take us.

If you’d like a PDF or Word copy of the chart, just send me an email at the Asia Catalyst address. But you might do better to create your own chart, rating projects according to whichever indicators are best suited to your own organization.