HEART BEATS BRAIN

HEART BEATS BRAIN - is the title of a presentation we've done at a few conferences and it references the inclination we humans have to be inspired to action by stories, rarely statistics.

As such, I’d like to gently suggest a dose of caution in adopting a data-driven approach to determining the success of nonprofit programs. 

Even when there exist discrete, measurable results – acres conserved, meals served, homeless housed – their true impact is, for all intents and purposes, priceless.

How can we hope to measure the ongoing benefits of:
 * the hours enjoyed by residents strolling on their newly preserved acreage;
* free lunches and how much they helped a hungry student succeed in school;
* housing that finally provided the stability necessary for a person to get and keep a job.

The value of nonprofits cannot be made to fit into a capitalist business model and this trend should be tempered. What is the value of one life made better? And what about the lives that life touches?

The work of most nonprofits is exponential — the beneficial results expanding outward in our communities like the ripples on the surface of a pond.

Yes, the nonprofit community needs to ensure that their “impact stories are rooted in evidence,” as one fundraiser suggested, but the nonprofit community should be relying less on data and more on authentic success stories shared by the beneficiaries of nonprofit programs
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Relying on statistics to prove the worth of programs not only fails at doing so, but it gives short shrift to the human element — the most important, and valuable, part of the nonprofit mission.