Results-Based Accountability Part Three: Context


Author: Don Matteson

The last couple of posts in this series (here and here) have provided a high-level overview of Results-Based Accountability (RBA), and population accountability in particular. As a refresher, RBA is an ends-to-means approach to creating and measuring change at the community (i.e., population) and program (i.e., organization or service) levels. It’s built around goals (result statements, or statements of desired well-being for specific populations) and five questions:

  • How are we doing? (Looking at community indicators and/or program performance measures. We look for a trend and, if we don’t like the direction, we want to figure out how to make things better in the future or, “turn the curve.”)
  • What’s the story? (What are the factors that are promoting or inhibiting beneficial outcomes?)
  • What works? (What strategies can we employ to make progress towards the goal we’ve defined?)
  • Who are our partners in turning the curve? (Who are we/can we/should we work with to make progress towards our goal?) and
  • What’s our action plan? (What strategies are we going to pursue?)

Population accountability in particular was an important place to start because that’s one of the places that people often get tripped up with RBA. We always need to remember that our work exists as part of a bigger picture. Result statements and population accountability help us keep our focus at that high level.

Now that we know where we’re headed (result statement), how we’re doing (population indicator), and have a sense of what factors have brought us to this point (the story behind the curve), this post focuses on the third and fourth RBA questions: What works? and Who are our partners in turning the curve? Let’s explore these further.

What works to turn the curve?

When we think about what works to turn the curve, we get to start scratching all those itches that tell us that we need to do something. We get to start thinking about strategies. Brainstorm — don’t self-censor or edit; you’ll be doing some of that later.

Evidence-based approaches

Maybe you start with evidence-based approaches (definitely don’t stop there, though!). Maybe you can take a look at what you’re already doing that you know benefits the people you serve. It’s always a good idea to consider what’s working in other communities that you can maybe import. (Remember that what works in one place might not work in another, at least not without some modification. Also, remember that everything that’s evidence-based today didn’t have evidence when it was first developed.)

Several years back (pre-RBA for us), we offered grants to organizations who were interested in implementing evidence-based practices for mental health. We chose specific interventions that the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) identified as evidence-based and that we felt were especially well-aligned with the Foundation’s priorities. We offered those grants for several years, and we believe they made a difference for the organizations and people served. ← Link to Nick’s EBP RFP Evaluation Blog Post from Nov 2014 (needs to be re-posted)

Off-the-wall ideas

Maybe a little more fun than sticking with evidence-based/evidence-informed/research-based strategies, we employ some creativity: If cost were no object, what might we try? You want to think up some off-the-wall ideas based on your understanding of the factors that contribute to the outcomes you want and the factors that keep your community from getting there. You never know — money might become available to make that off-the-wall idea happen. More likely, your off-the-wall idea will inspire an idea that’s well within the realm of possibility with the resources at hand or reasonably obtainable.

I admit, it can be hard to come up with off-the-wall ideas. We’re pretty much trained/socialized to think more about the reasons we can’t do something than we are to dream big (that’s another blog post for a different blog entirely). One slightly off-the-wall idea that we played with very early in our RBA days was awarding large pools of money to community-based coalitions, which could be accessed for smaller projects using a very simple application format (based on A3 reporting, if you’re curious). Not super-revolutionary, but we weren’t accustomed to giving communities that much flexibility with their dollars, and with such a streamlined proposal and review process. All we were looking for was approval from the coalition’s leadership (whatever that looked like) and evidence that it was aligned with the coalition’s goals. Looking back, I would say that had mixed success but it also paved the way a bit for some of our thinking about how to make our process simpler and more accessible to grant applicants.

No-cost/Low-cost ideas

Even though evidence-based and off-the-wall ideas can be costly to implement, don’t wed yourself to approaches that are expensive. Another core tenet of RBA is that if your list of strategies is incomplete if there aren’t any low- or no-cost activities! At the other creative extreme, you want to think about what you can do right now that’s low- or no-cost. Don’t let lack of funding be an excuse for inaction. We sell ourselves short and invite inaction any time we convince ourselves that we need money to make any sort of difference. There’s a very good chance that you have non-monetary resources that you can bring to bear on influencing the curve for one or more of your community indicators. You probably won’t solve the problem entirely using free/cheap approaches (otherwise someone probably would have solved the problem already), but you can start nudging things in the right direction, and maybe set up one of your other non-free-or-cheap initiatives for success.

As an example of starting with a low-or-no cost strategy, we decided as a team to learn more about Human-Centered Design. We had access to a free course on Human Centered Design through Plus-Acumen, so we worked our way through the lessons and exercises over the course of several months. By the time we got to the end, we decided to see how we could build a project that helped to advance our goal that, “Young people with intellectual disabilities are engaged in meaningful social, vocational, and educational pursuits.” We ended up deciding to create an advisory team of young people with autism or intellectual disabilities to weigh in on some of the funding requests we received in the intellectual disabilities grant category. For the cost of a few evenings, some pizzas, and refreshments, we had the honor of hosting about nine young people who shared their insights into what they liked and didn’t like about the grant requests in front of them. From there, we took the idea further and we now have two bodies of Participatory Grantmaking work today: the Community Experts Team and Community Grant Consultants. Both give young people with lived expertise in our issue areas the opportunity to be heard and influence how dollars are spent as well as giving the Foundation more insight into what people affected by intellectual disabilities, learning disabilities, mental health, and/or substance use disorders want and value.

Who are our partners in turning the curve?

Once you have a list of strategy ideas, you can turn your attention to the partners who can help you in turning the curve. There’s a very good chance you’re already working with many of these partners, especially the ones with clear mission-alignment. This is also a good time to start looking at those strategy ideas and thinking about who might help with new strategies. Be sure to think creatively and expansively about this list — think about people and organizations who don’t work directly on your issue, but might still have a stake in your outcomes. Who are some unlikely partners, maybe from a different sector entirely? Are there partners you could be working with in government? From other communities?

One particularly interesting example for us has been some of our advocacy work. We were interested in advocacy, but weren’t sure how to approach it. The Patrick P. Lee Foundation had reached out to Peg’s Foundation and the Scattergood Foundation to learn more about a policy paper series they’d been publishing. The Lee Foundation’s Executive Director invited us to join the conversation, and we ended up working together on the Think Bigger, Do Good Policy Paper Series. While we’ve collaborated with the Lee Foundation for years, Peg’s Foundation and the Scattergood Foundation (and now the Sozosei Foundation) were non-obvious partners that are really well aligned and doing great work that we’re thrilled to be part of today.

What’s next?

These two questions inform each other heavily. The strategies we choose will suggest partners, and the partners we have can suggest new strategies. Ultimately, one of RBA’s most attractive qualities is that it’s strategy-agnostic. Its flexibility gives you license to respond to changing conditions very quickly. You can take varied approaches and work with many different partners to achieve the same outcome, so no need to be prescriptive; alignment is key.

Now that we’ve addressed the first four RBA questions, we’ll turn to RBA’s last question in the next post: “What is our action plan to turn the curve?”