Strategic Initiatives & Grant Outcomes

Strategic Initiatives are a framework for tracking impact goals with measurable outcomes comprised of two pieces:

• Strategic Initiative: A broad framework for tracking impact goals for the organization with measurable metrics.

• Grant Outcomes: Ability to track agreed-upon impact outcomes as it pertains to an individual grant. This is to aid in reporting impact updates back to your funders.

Strategic Initiatives can track and measure impact metrics via Grant Outcomes or via Impact Updates. There is no limit to the number of Strategic Initiatives or metrics that can be associated per initiative. 

Overview

Initiatives are listed under the Impact tab. There, you'll see a list of all your organization's initiatives along with their metrics and their progress to date.

Creating a New Initiative

 To create a new initiative:

1. Click the '+ Add Initiative' button
2. A form will appear with available fields to fill out. 
   Please note: The Initiative Statement on the right shows how your Initiative Statement will appear, with the field names being populated with information from the corresponding fields on the left.
   
3. To add a second metric to your Strategic Initiative, click '+ Add Metric' and another section will appear. After doing this, each additional metric will be shown in the Initiative Statement on the right. Please note: the Goals Value and Success Metric will also pull from the values set in each metric.

Editing Existing Initiatives

From the Strategic Initiatives tab, open the Strategic Initiative you wish you edit. Once you have done so, you can edit the existing initiative by clicking the 'Edit' button.

You can also add new Impact Updates from this page by clicking either '+Add New' or '+Impact Update.'

In the right-hand menu, you can select the tasks icon to see related tasks for this Strategic Initiative.

From this page you can choose to see your Strategic Initiatives updates as a Bar Chart or a Timeline.

*Note on Privacy

You'll find thatby default your posts will be set to private. Only by selecting the 'Visibility' checkbox when creating a new update or editing an existing one will it be set to public. Please let us know if you have any further questions!

Grant Outcomes

You can also a track specific Grant Outcomes. To do this, navigate to a specific grant record for which you would like to add metrics. On the panel to the right of your Grant information, scroll down the different icons until you see the Outcomes icon:

From there, select the outcomes icon, click on +Add New, and add and/or edit any Grant Outcomes and Metrics. Then click Save:

Metrics

Metrics are a framework for measuring your organization's concrete progress toward goals. No two goals are alike, just as no two non-profit organizations are alike, so Metrics let you decide what you want to measure when tracking the work that your organization does as it pertains to a Strategic Initiative or Grant Outcome.

Types of Metrics

Metrics can be:

• numbers, eg. "Houses built"
• percentages, eg. "Children in our community fed"
• currency, eg. "Dollars raised"