When I was updating my website recently, I came across a post I wrote when my daughter was a newborn, talking about the metrics that were relevant to me at the time.
It listed things like how many ounces she was eating at a time, how little sleep we got each night, and how many times we had to put her pacifier back in every hour (That one still makes me shudder).
I couldn’t believe how different my perspective is now, four years later.
Thank GOODNESS, sleep, ounces of milk, and dropped pacifiers are no longer relevant.
Nowadays, we’re more concerned about things like:
- How many times she’s eaten mac and cheese in the last week,
- How many questions she has asked me in the last five minutes,
- How many times we’ve watched the Spidey and His Amazing Friends series in its entirety (too many, friends),
- How many consecutive illnesses we’ve had in a given month or year.
Same kid, same parents, different point in time. Isn’t it wild how much things can change?
Which metrics are more important? Which ones should we actually be monitoring or not?
Let’s be real: it’s all relative.
Some days, when you want to pull your hair out because you’ve heard the Spidey theme song 1,000 times, that one seems really important.
But most days, you also realize that maybe she’s drawing or snuggling with us while she watches. So some extra screen time with a benign, but mildly irritating show may not be so bad.
And when you’re in the newborn stage, sleeping and feeding is all you think about.
It’s the same for organizations. Sometimes what we need to track during one period of time isn’t relevant after a while.
We can also collect every data point under the sun and still have no clue what’s happening with our work.
It’s about focusing on your goals: What do we want to accomplish? What is in alignment with our values?
Maybe some more important questions for this phase of parenting would be:
- How many hours of quality time did I have with my kid today?
- What kinds of conversations did we have in the car and at the dinner table?
- In what ways did we support her when she was melting down?
Those may not be as easy to track. They might require some qualitative information or different measures to fully capture.
But they matter a whole lot more than Spidey and mac and cheese.
In your work, maybe it’s not about how many referrals you got but how many lives changed as a result of getting connected with your organization.
We can still track referrals, right? But we don’t base our assessment of our work solely on that measure.
Connecting our evaluation plans to our values doesn’t always focus on the low-hanging fruit.
It might take some extra work.
But it gives your work purpose and allows you to craft your story and truly measure the impact you’re having on families.
Because changing lives is a pretty cool story to tell.