July 24, 2019 | Read Time: 4 minutes
A new web tool, called “Measure What Matters,” can help nonprofits determine how best to tackle community-health problems. A nonprofit worker who logs onto the site is prompted to answer a series of questions, such as:
- What health problem are you working on?
- Do you have partners?
- Where is your organization located?
- What population does your nonprofit seek to help, and in what time frame?
When the user plugs in answers to these and other queries, the tool draws up a plan to deal with the specific health problem in the user’s community, whether it is high blood pressure among homeless women or juvenile diabetes among students.
Demonstrate Need, Design Solutions, Share Results
The tool is part of a broader approach to health measurement called the “Well-Being in the Nation (WIN) Measurement Framework,” which was designed by 100 Million Healthier Lives, a collaboration convened by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Well Being Trust. The group, which includes community organizations, foundations, government agencies, nonprofits, and researchers, aspires to improve 100 million lives by the end of 2020.
The group sought to identify the key measurements that determine a person’s health and the overall health profile of a neighborhood. Looking beyond measures such as weight, blood pressure, and blood-sugar levels, WIN distilled dozens of health measurements into a set of essential social factors, including access to healthful food, crime rate, school absenteeism, and the number of parks and other recreation sites. The group then combined the data in each of those areas and mapped them geographically, so nonprofits and governments can see how their regions stack up compared with others.
The Measure What Matters tool uses that data library to help nonprofits determine local needs, allocate resources, and track results.
For instance, the website can help nonprofits develop a “theory of change” — a description of a problem and the role they can play in solving it — that they can use to design programs.
It also can help an organization identify partners to work with in its region, decide whether a project is likely to be short- or long-term, and determine if gains will be spread out among all members of a local population or concentrated among a single demographic, such as the elderly or LGBTQ people.
The tool also can provide data to help grant seekers demonstrate the need for their work when writing a statement of support for a grant proposal, by showing the prevalence of a specific malady in a given region and the number of nonprofits or government agencies devoting resources to it.
Measure What Matters also allows users to input data collected in the field in order to generate progress reports to grant makers and other evaluators.
Factors Influencing Health Can Be Hard to Pin Down
WIN developed the tool because the relationships among social factors that determine health aren’t always obvious. For instance, providing housing isn’t enough to improve the health of people who are chronically homeless. Other factors, such as access to healthful food and a feeling of social connection, can also affect health.
The Downtown Women’s Center, in Los Angeles, used the framework to measure the results of a program that provides stable housing to those in need. Many of the center’s clients suffer from diabetes and high blood pressure, and it found that when they were accompanied to farmers’ markets and taught how to use their food-stamp benefits to get fresh produce, their sense of well-being increased 84 percent in a few months. The framework helped show the center that the social-emotional support provided by its staff members was essential to the women’s using the market, eating better, and improving their health
Data Can Help Organizations Set Priorities
Leigh Caswell is incorporating the measurement framework into the health assessments she oversees as vice president for community health at Presbyterian Healthcare Services, in Albuquerque.
The well-being measures, she believes, will help her decide where to concentrate her efforts throughout New Mexico, whether in a certain county or with members of a particular group, such as young children in need.
The social measures can be more helpful than traditional measures, which often focus on the number of patients treated in a clinic, Caswell says. And by tapping into a national database she says, it is possible that grant makers will take notice of the results.
“Foundations that fund things across the country want to be able to measure impact in a consistent way,” she says. “If you can be aligned with a framework a lot of people are using, it can be really powerful. It brings a legitimacy to the work.”
