[MUSIC] We've talked about what goes into a scorecard. Now, I'd like to focus a little bit on some examples on how you actually go about constructing one. We'll look at some real life cases and hopefully, those will help you move to the next stage, which is drafting your own scorecard. We'll look inside the arts and outside the arts for insights about how to do this work. Let's start with the Cleveland Museum of Art. It developed a very powerful dashboard that it displays on its website. So the whole world can see how well it's doing across a whole number of metrics. It has essentially six clusters, one around the building. Second around the collection. Third around community engagement and how well it's connecting to it. Fourth around people, fifth around supporters and finally, a final basket around visitors. All six kind of metrics and clusters of metrics are important to the museum. And in fact, on their website, they have a kind of a rotating dashboard that kind of flows through these different metrics and different areas to show people what's going on. Here's an example of two of their kind of dashboards. I've stacked them one on top of the other. And what you'll see in them, I'll just point to a couple of the key indicators there. You'll see they have things like the number of web views of YouTube videos that they produced. They have things about the metrics about the amount of money they've collected. They have metrics around corporate partnerships. And they have metrics around a whole series of other things. A whole range of other imaginable metrics related to everything you can think about in terms of exhibitions, collections outreach in other areas. This I think, is not a bad starting point to look at how you might construct a dashboard. Now of course, you're gonna have your own set of priorities. You're gonna have your own set of programs that you're gonna wanna focus on. But in this case, they chose across six different areas. Topics that they thought were important or metrics that they thought were revealing. And they use them both internally and externally to tell the story about how well the museum is doing. Here's a simpler scorecard, it's one from a human service organization. That works with people confronting major stresses. What they wanted is three baskets. One around financial indicators, a second one around mission and a third and last one around people or the internal HR side of the organization. There, they simplify down the metrics I think pretty effectively. They focus on questions about revenue, expenditures and months of expenses on hand. They were very interested in this question of liquidity. They added their own metric around the ratio of restricted to unrestricted funds because that was so essential to them. But they constructed for themselves a set of financial indicators that tell their story. Internally about what they need to watch and what they need to keep an eye on. When it comes to mission, they have a whole series of output measures that they pulled out of their logic model and integrated into the scorecard. Then they chose one and only one outcome measure that they thought was by far the most important. And that is this GAF score, general well-being score that they calculate. They test people before therapy and after therapy on a scale of one to ten. And they're able to construct this GAF score which gives them a real sense about how effective their counseling programs are. That's the one that they wanted to have them make the dashboard. That's the one that mattered the most to them, so it's there. Finally when it comes to the people dimension, they wanna know how satisfied their staff members are. What they're doing to promote them internally? What their retention rates are? How well they are doing at taking development courses? How well the board is engaging with the organization? A whole series of internal kind of staff and board metrics that are important to the organization. Put it together, you have a very simple and I think useful dashboard. Let's look at a different dashboard. This one's from a private school and here instead of three baskets, they actually chose six. They have financial indicators, academic indicators, advancement or fundraising indicators, community engagement indicators, growth indicators and finally some indicators related to implementation, their strategic plan. Now they have a very, I think visually compelling way of displaying their information. They use color codes. They use red light for problem areas. Yellow lights for areas that need attention. And green lights for areas that are right on track. Behind this dashboard, which looks very simple, you would find of course, a lot of data, a lot of numbers. They have, for each of these areas, data that drives these indicators. So don't think that they're rounded up. They actually are hard numbers that they're collecting, but they're translating for the board in this case, this is included in every board package. They're translating the data into these indicators that the board can look at. And in a very quick moment say, here's what we need to focus on in our meeting, here's what we need to talk about. There are areas where we're doing well. We can push those later in the agenda. The areas we really need to concentrate are those red areas where we're falling behind and we're not where we need to be. So the dashboard in this case, I think is a powerful tool for increasing the effectiveness of governance. It focuses the board's attention on what matters and where the problems might lie, that the board can actually intervene and help solve. So, let's think a little bit about how you get started on developing your own dashboard. I'd like you to start by just thinking about a few selected outputs that you think are the most important. Those metrics or those counts of activity levels that you think tell something important. I want you to surround them with a few limited numbers of outcomes that you think you can track and deliver on. That would be a nice starting point for social impact indicators. Then I'd like you to choose for yourself, a group of financial indicators that tell the story that you think is important. I've suggested six, you can choose among those, or you can go and find other ones that really are more relevant to your organization. The bottom line is you need a small group of financial indicators that really give the financial picture in summary. I'd like you also to select some metrics that tell something how the board, how volunteers, how staff, how stakeholders around the organization view it. And feel about it. You need to get some kind of survey data into the organization that gives you insight into what people think about your organization. How they perceive it and how they experience it. And finally, how about a few quality indicators about how you're doing operationally. What are the things you're doing really well and what areas are you falling short in. In terms of delivering quality service on a regular basis. If you have all four of these, I think you'd have the starting point for something very helpful in terms of managing more effectively. So let's think a little bit more about where we stand with performance measurement today. It's the rage, everyone talks about performance measurement, not that many people actually do it. I'd like to make it simple enough and accessible enough for you to be able to give it a try. If you construct a dashboard, I think you can start by connecting it to your logic model. You can customize it to fit your organization. You can commit as much time and money as you think you need to collect the data that would drive the dashboard forward. You gotta be careful to implement evenly across the different areas. It's very tempting to collect a lot of data in one area and not in another. But ultimately, I'd like you to try to keep it simple as you move forward, as you try this experiment. Construct a dashboard that will be helpful to you. That will give you the information you need to get better and that will point your attention on what matters most. So I think ultimately dashboards and scorecards are powerful tools for performance measurement. I think they get the fundamental insight right, which is that performance is not one-dimensional, it's multi-dimensional. And the scorecard by its very nature, points your attention across a range of different areas and draws your attention to those things within those areas that matter most. It's not perfect because there is some imbalance between the precision of the financial metrics and some of the social metrics. But that shouldn't stop you from doing this work. You gotta overcome that and give it a chance and push it as far as you can. I think it's a good starting point. Is it the final word? No, but it's a good starting point for an organization that wants to get serious about measuring performance. And as I said, how can you possibly get better unless you know how well you're doing? [MUSIC]
