An End to the Overhaul of the Metrics System

Oh, it’s nervous times here at Nuru, I must say. Good times, but nervous times.

Janine Brown and Lindsay Cope are getting ready to present their recommendations to Jake, Vivian, and Aerie about the size, shape, look, feel, intent, and meaning of our overhauled Healthcare program. They are recommending some exciting stuff, but a lot of what they’re recommending will entail follow-on work. They have to just temper the expectations they set next week in terms of what they present, because they don’t want the recipients of their presentation to feel like they are presenting the final answer. They’re presenting an iteration of some portions of the final answer. It’s good, though. We love to iterate here at Nuru…we love to iterate.

Over the sea at the project site, the team on the ground (of which Lindsay Cope is a part), is getting ready to return here to the States for a holiday break next week. They all have a lot to do before they get on those planes to come back here, and Jennifer Lee, our research liaison in the field now, is trying to facilitate some parts of their work. She has compiled a comprehensive document to help them track all of the data they have gathered and are gathering in the field.

We hope that this document will act as a tool to ensure that data gathering efforts are not duplicated over time unnecessarily, and to help team members figure out how to use data. We are now working on nailing down all uses of the tool so that we can revise it as necessary.

The funding situation seems to be pretty good, its something about which we’re often nervous, but we are not this month. It’s kind of funny. We have a great matching funds campaign going on during the month of December. Donations are being matched by funders, so every dollar we get in December becomes two of them.

And finally and most significant for our Research Team, the big long process that we have undergone this year of a re-design of our metrics system is coming to something of an end. We seem to have gotten close to nailing down the universal system we want to use, and we are working closely with all of our program experts to solidify our program metrics.  This has been a very exciting process.

As with much else of the work we do here, though, our iterative processes will make the final product of this metrics 2.0 work a little different from what we might have anticipated a year ago. Because we are redesigning three of our five program areas right now, a decision about how to measure the impact of each of these areas is pretty challenging to make. Some might argue that making it at all is a tad premature! So, therefore, we are developing and will have ready to present draft indicators for a few of our program areas in the near term, but as with the Healthcare program recommendations – they are not set in stone. They are draft.

More next week and thanks for reading!