Freedom from Hunger and our partner implementing organizations share a common social goal—to equip poor women with the resources they need to help themselves and their families.  To achieve this goal, it is important that we advance services that are organizationally and financially sustainable and achieve social impact objectives. This requires making important decisions about how our limited resources—both financial and human—are allocated so that they provide the greatest social benefit. To be able to make informed decisions, we need timely information about how well our systems, processes and investments are working to support the achievement of our goals.  Performance management systems provide that critical information, allowing Freedom from Hunger and partner implementing organizations to balance organizational, financial and social goals.  Recognizing the importance of performance management to achieving mission, we have made organizational and financial performance a key focus of our services and social performance a key area of innovation.

The Social Bottom Line

Financial and organizational performance are only half of an organization’s story. They can provide some indication of how well an organization is sustaining its service delivery, but financial and organizational performance indicators often lag.  By the time positive or negative social impacts manifest themselves in financial or organizational performance, the opportunity to maximize on successes or avoid damaging mistakes is often missed. Yet, until recently, organizations relied primarily on organizational and financial performance indicators to internally assess and externally demonstrate their success.

Recognizing the need for information on social performance for timely decision-making and management, Freedom from Hunger’s recent collaborative efforts have focused on this crucial area of performance management.  Specifically, Freedom from Hunger is working actively to develop a framework to monitor and manage social outcomes through the following activities:

• Imp-Act Consortium. Freedom from Hunger is an active member of the Imp-Act Consortium, a group of development organizations committed to realizing the potential of microfinance by supporting implementing organizations to develop social performance management systems. In an important step, we have contributed to the design of a social performance management training that enables microfinance institutions to translate their mission into practice.

• Food Security Assessment Tool. Freedom from Hunger has developed a tool to measure household food security levels and closely related poverty status of clients. This cost-effective tool enables implementing organizations to measure incoming poverty levels of clients as well as monitor changes in their poverty status over time.

• Small Enterprise Education and Promotion/Assessing the Impacts of Microenterprise Services (SEEP/AIMS) tools. Freedom from Hunger participated in the testing and development of the SEEP/AIMS tools that were commissioned by USAID to respond to the need for more social impact information. These include impact survey, client satisfaction, client exit and loan-use measurement tools.

• Other Social Performance Measurement Tools.  In addition to the activities listed above, Freedom from Hunger has developed tools to measure changes in knowledge and behavior as a result of our Lifeskills Training Series, as well as monitor the quality and quantity of the curricula delivered to clients. We also assist partners to develop streamlined processes to monitor key social performance indicators.

• Impact Evaluation.  As an evidence-focused organization, impact research is an important component of Freedom from Hunger’s performance management work. We look for opportunities to collaborate with external researchers to answer important questions about how well our programs and those of our partners demonstrate changes in client, family and community well-being.