Why Effectively Tracking Outcomes at Your Nonprofit is Important 

Outcomes is a nonprofit industry term used to describe the qualitative and quantitative conclusions that you can draw from the outputs your organization has collected. Outcomes oftentimes describe measurements of change that have happened within your organization or your programs.   

Identifying the change affected by your organization and the opportunities for change are helpful in making your nonprofit even more effective. And being able to demonstrate that change is critical in securing funding.  

Let’s dive into how to better track outcomes, how case management software can play a role, and how one nonprofit has been able to track outcomes more effectively using Apricot 360. 

Counting Outputs and Tracking Outcomes

You’ll frequently see outcomes in the form of percentages. For example, a housing organization may see an 80% reduction in recidivism, or a healthcare nonprofit may record a 45% increase in preventive healthcare screenings.   

These figures come directly from the data you collect and the outputs you’re counting at your organization. Outputs are the quantifiable metrics and data points in your organization. For a youth organization for example, outputs could be the number of students who attended an after-school program or how many school supplies were given to a school system. 

Even if your staffers don’t call the process “counting outputs,” your organization probably already does this on a regular basis. 

It’s cumbersome and tasking for nonprofits to track those outputs without case management software. Case management software like Apricot 360 allows your caseworkers to consistently and quickly input outputs into one, centralized location. This then allows staffers on their teams and across departments to view that data, pull reports, and develop insights on the outcomes of the organization’s programs. 

Tracking Outcomes Effectively at A Place Called Home

Without software like Apricot, it’s not an easy task for nonprofits to identify their outcomes in a unified way. Laura Mills, senior director of data & systems operations at A Place Called Home in Los Angeles, California, recently joined Social Solutions and the Nonprofit Times for a webinar on what funders want to see from nonprofits. She said tracking outcomes at APCH has “been a thorny question for us, I’ll be honest.” 

“It’s not something we have all the answers to right now or that we have historically. APCH is coming up on our 30^th anniversary, which is very exciting,” she said.  “But we started like a lot of nonprofits as a tiny community-based organization in the basement of a church and the programs grew in response to community needs, which is my long way of saying we didn’t always build in outcome management as part of that program growth. And we’re really focused on, ‘What do our members need? What do their families need?’ And that’s not always going to be filling out a survey, although we recognize the extreme importance of doing that.” 

Laura said that, since adopting Apricot 360 and building up capacity at the nonprofit, her organization has been able to create a system of tracking outcomes by creating an organization logic model and theory of change, which is something APCH didn’t have at the outset of its programming. 

“So, we’ve brought in external consultants who are helping us build out our capacity. Plug for Social Solutions—a big part of getting that capacity ready was switching over to being Apricot 360 users over the last couple of years,” she said. 

In addition to building capacity, adopting Apricot 360 has allowed APCH to ditch spreadsheets and track data in a centralized place. APCH’s previous method for tracking was arduous, time-consuming, and vulnerable to errors and data loss. 

Even with great case management software, tracking outcomes can be difficult for nonprofits like APCH, because it takes many years to harvest the fruits of the organization’s mission and purpose. 

“For a lot of youth and community development organizations, our ultimate goal is long-term, lasting change where people have sustainable careers and they can contribute as active members of their community, etc.,” Laura said. “So, we know even if we’re with a young person for 10 years they’re going to continue with that growth over the course of their lifetime and be different at age 30, 40, etc.” 

Laura advises the many organizations also facing this predicament to get creative in capturing and sharing the insights of their work. At APCH, Laura’s team looks at research, indicators, and the long-term outcomes shown by similar organizations that have been around longer. 

You can ensure the longevity of your own nonprofit when you can demonstrate your outcomes—your impact—to current and potential funders. 

Start Tracking Outcomes at Your Nonprofit with Apricot

Tracking outcomes at your organization doesn’t need to be a daunting and time-consuming task. By implementing case management software like Apricot 360, you can let us do the heavy lifting while you focus on driving change in your community. Get an Apricot 360 demo today.