What your funders want to see: Subjective vs. Objective Measurements

Qualitative data or Quantative data? It’s the old story-What do we measure? Why do we measure it?

Camilla Nevill at the New Philanthropy Capital Blog has just made a fascinating post about the concept of happiness in funding. What she asks is, should we be measuring things like well-being as well as test scores when deciding if a nonprofit is fulfilling its mission?

She has hit upon, but not totally explored, this concept of happiness as a search, or as a state of being.

I believe that our problem is “Trying. To. Be. Happy.” No one is happy all of the time, or should be happy all of the time, and in fact, as Jenny Holzer says, “Disgust is the appropriate response to most situations.”

The medicalization of our emotional states aside from happiness has allowed us to think that there is something wrong with us if we are not “happy.” Having grown up when many of my schoolmates were on Ritalin or Prozac, I feel that we do ourselves a disservice by trying to measure “well-being” or trying to make others have an emotional experience that we deem necessary.

Doesn’t it annoy you when people tell you how you SHOULD be feeling?

Where did this concept of “should feel” come from?

Why are we so focused on happiness as a measure of “well-being”?

I blame the positive psychology movement.

Movies like “The Secret” and “What the Bleep Do We Know?” talk about how important it is to feel and be happy all the time, to think happy thoughts, and then, for sure, you’ll get positive outcomes. This has been subverted by corporations such as Fed-Ex Kinko’s to mean “All workers should be happy all of the time, and if they’re not, they are bad workers.”

Is it 1984 yet?

For more about how the positive psychology movement is hurting America, read, “The Illusion of Happiness chapter in “The Empire of Illusion” by Pulitzer Prize winning author Chris Hedges.

Your donors and funders love to see quotes from clients, of course, but there is no way to measure if your clients are measurably happier solely because of your nonprofit. As Peter Frumkin has stated, there’s too much noise in the system. And why should you be working to make them happier? What if happiness to a diabetic looks like a jar of tootsie rolls?

No.

You need all emotional states to be a full human being. You need to cry and grieve when things go wrong. You need to laugh when you’re happy. But you should not have to wear a mask to pretend one emotion or another, for this will only hurt you, your nonprofit, your corporation, your donors, and your clients. For more on how this is hurting you personally, read Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Bright-sided How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America”

Happiness is not something to strive to measure. If you can PROVE that your nonprofit made someone’s life better, through getting them counseling, or making sure they got after-school tutoring, or a breakfast, or housing vouchers, then that should satisfy your funders.

What are your thoughts? Has your nonprofit even TRIED to measure happiness?