The starting point for most social enterprises in measurement is to set up a bookkeeping system to track money in and money out. While financial bookkeeping and accounting are fundamental to running a business, it may also be useful to track other aspects of business performance early on to be able to make good operational and planning decisions.
When it comes to tracking the business success of a social enterprise, it’s important to focus in on indicators that are truly important and directly useful to the decisions that you need to make. When any small business gets off the ground, there is a constant process of evolution in which you are evaluating success and revising what you do informally, with support from financial tracking and intuition.
"There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns - there are things we do not know we don't know."
-Former US of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld
Are you about to engage in strategic or business planning in your organization? Planning offers a great point to think about what has and hasn’t worked in the past, how you create value (for community, within your business and organization), how you can create even more value, and ways to measure your success moving forward. Demonstrating Value can complement planning activities in a number of ways.
Client Relationship Management (CRM) systems are a mix of policies, processes and strategies used by organizations to manage contacts and track their interactions with their stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, volunteers, employees, funders, donors, clients and others. Keeping these contacts organized can be difficult (especially as organizations grow in size), so many seek to develop more formal systems for tracking this information using CRMs. Yet selecting and effectively using CRMs can be a challenge, especially for organizations with limited resources.
