Tracking Progress

Ideally, you should regularly evaluate your coalition’s progress and adjust your strategies and resources as needed. Use updated data and feedback from the community and coalition members to refine your approach and ensure you are effectively addressing food insecurity. But this is a lot easier said than done.

Establish metrics

There are dozens, even hundreds, of potential data points you could track.  We started by creating an exhaustive list of metrics that we believed were relevant and mapped them to our coalition’s goals. We then prioritized them and sorted by feasibility. 

As a result, we were able to concentrate on a dozen metrics that we wanted to focus on as an overall organization.  

To collect them, we created a report template that gets filled out after each event or effort. Those are all stored in one place, so we can do cumulative reporting. We learned that sharing access to these reports and data is helpful. Whether this data is put in a shared drive or task management program, people are more likely to help collect it if they can see what is being collected—and why.

Why focus on metrics?

• Demonstrate progress to keep momentum among stakeholders and volunteers.
• Show value to potential donors and funding sources, including for grant applications. 
• Analyze and optimize efforts as you go. For example, if you deploy a solution to a problem, you’ll want to know whether it is helping. Or if you deploy multiple solutions, you’ll want to see which is helping most.

We looked at metrics through these lenses, with examples of the type of data we’re collecting with each.

1. Coalition Data: Overall participation, volunteer engagement, donations, people reached and big picture goals.
   
2. Action Teams: Depending on the focus, progress toward action team goals, and team member engagement. For example, how many people did the SNAP outreach team reach out to? How many people visited or called the county SNAP office?
3. Campaigns, Events and Initiatives: How many volunteers and hours went into the effort? How did they help us achieve goals? How many people participated, and how successful were the outcomes?

A Step-by-step Implementation Approach

Here’s an example step-by-step approach to implementing your metrics process.

1. Download our Metrics Template or begin your own.
2. Review our mission and goals, and list which metrics are the most important for or most aligned with tracking progress and impact related to each goal.
3. Discuss the list as a group, and build consensus on the prioritization.
4. For each metric, decide how often your coalition would benefit from knowing the numbers. For example, if you rely on donations and you rely on events to fundraise, it would make sense to report on donations after each event and perhaps annually. Or, if your primary mission is, for instance, serving people at a food shelf, one key metric might be the number of people served each week. Reporting weekly may be helpful, but if you order supplies or assign volunteers quarterly, then quarterly may be the optimal cadence.
5. It is important that the work gets completed as you go. Each metric should have an accountable point person. That person has to ensure the numbers are gathered, even if they delegate it to others.
6. It is very helpful to store reports, and the raw data, in a shared place so that no one person is a bottleneck if someone wants or needs to review the data.
7. Metrics are only as good as what you do with them. When your group meets, restate your mission and goal, and report on the latest metrics and trends. Then encourage discussion from various viewpoints, asking, what can we learn from these latest results? What do we need to know going forward, and how can we utilize what we have recently learned?
8. As your work increases, divide the responsibilities and tracking into areas that match the mission.
9. At the very least, plan to do an annual impact report, which can be as simple as a one-pager with key metrics from the past year. It should be helpful externally or even just for internal discussions. But people conceptualize most things on an annual basis so that cadence can serve as a solid foundation.

Key Learnings

• Do prioritize your metrics. There are infinite possibilities, but you should start with those that you can actually get done today.
• You can add complexity and categories as you go. But make sure you can walk before you run.
• Keep reports and raw data in clearly labeled, organized shared digital folders.
• Ask a spreadsheet aficionado to help you track and analyze, even if they aren’t a main coalition member. Find someone, perhaps at a local business, that is passionate about numbers!
• Use the metrics as tools to inform strategy.
• Use the metrics as tools to tell your story.
• Cite your sources! That will help if you ever need to check on something, or if someone else takes over.
• Don’t be afraid to add/drop metrics depending on usefulness.
• We suggest a master spreadsheet, perhaps with one tab for each metric source or type, where you can store summaries over time. That way, you don’t have to go back to the raw data for every new report, making it easy to review trends and progress over time.
• Maintain a document that describes your metrics strategy and implementation plan. Include details on what you track, how you track, and why. And helpful tips for others. That way, if someone needs to fill in, they can hit the ground running.