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Impact Measurement Using the Org Chart
Andrew Walker
July 09, 2024
Charities often struggle to measure their effectiveness due to fragmented data, but examining the org chart can offer quick insights. By comparing the ratio of customer-facing staff to support staff, you can identify inefficiencies and opportunities for better resource allocation, potentially doubling service delivery without additional funding.
Most charities aim to better measure their effectiveness to use as a benchmark over time and against other organisations in the same field. However, the challenge often lies in accessing the necessary data. Even organisations with advanced systems struggle to consolidate this information into a single repository for sustainable reporting.
As an external consultant, this issue is even more pronounced for me due to limited time for observations and recommendations. I might ask a new client for the number of face-to-face hours between workers and clients, but retrieving that information manually from various systems can take longer than my entire engagement.
As a reasonable proxy, I've found a way to gain crude insights into an organisation's effectiveness by examining the org chart. I don't mean the diagram typically generated by humans, which is often incomplete and outdated. Instead, I refer to an extract from the HR system. This system usually has one or two fields of information that can help predict whether an employee, volunteer, or contractor is in a customer-facing role. By looking at the proportion of customer-facing staff to non-customer-facing staff, I can quickly get a clear picture of how efficiently the organisation delivers services for the funding they receive from government and non-government sources.
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