The Advancing Solutions Team of the Bush Foundation recently hosted 20 community change researchers and evaluators from across the country, many of them colleagues I’ve met through the Community Development Society, a professional association. They came together to help us learn more about the difficult work of measuring progress in complex community change initiatives that seek to improve community vitality.

Our Foundation’s mission “is to be a catalyst for the courageous leadership necessary to create sustainable solutions to tough public problems and ensure community vitality.” We asked for measurement advice because we want to be able to gauge our effectiveness at fulfilling that mission, which ultimately depends on helping communities measure their community vitality over time and the effects of various efforts to improve vitality.

Measuring the effectiveness of one strategy over another is difficult to trace in community change initiatives because there are so many factors at work. But that challenge offers a great learning opportunity – for communities, for funders of community change work like the Bush Foundation and for the community change field itself.

Our panel of researchers said a first step was asking a more basic question: How do you define community vitality? What do you see in your mind and on the street when you say your community is vital? One person’s idea of community vitality might be vastly different from another’s.

One way to figure out how people define community vitality is to ask them what indicators they would choose to say that their community is vital or not. Indicators help us know and express how our community is doing. It’s like a thermometer reading that not only tells me I have a fever but how high my temperature is and, over time, whether or not it’s climbing. Knowing that information helps me make decisions about how and when to act.

Choosing indicators among the many that help define vitality, or creating new ones to demonstrate your definition of vitality, helps you fine-tune what you mean by vitality. It also demonstrates where your vision of vitality might differ from other citizens in your community.  In those differences comes a chance for conversations that help discern and refine commonly held goals for community vitality. And that’s when short- and long-term measurements can start happening – when your goals and indicators align.

In Minnesota, we have a good start on general indicators that measure progress and inspire action. Minnesota Compass is a dashboard of indicators that gives everyone a common foundation from which to identify, understand and act on issues that affect our communities. (By the way, development of North Dakota Compass began last year and the site will launch later this year. Work on the early stages of a Compass-like tool for South Dakota has also begun.)

Another way to learn more about indicators and their linkage to performance measurement is to check out the Community Indicators Consortium (CIC). Their report, Creating Stronger Linkages between Community Indicator Projects and Government Performance Measurement Efforts, published in 2007, identifies the benefits to be gained from such linkages.

We’ll use these and other resources as we continue to develop a measurement framework for our community change work. We welcome any insights you have from experiences in your own communities and organizations.