Lost in Translation: Tweets and Caring About Metrics

At SoCap09 two weeks ago, I spoke on a moderated panel called “True Tales of Amazement and Horror from the Fundraising Circuit” with Don Shaffer, Shari Berenbach, Penelope Douglas and moderator Stuart Davidson. It was a great group - one I was honored to be a part of - and it was a successful panel in no small part thanks to Stuart’s questions.

One of those questions was directed at me; Stuart asked, “Do metrics sell on the fundraising circuit?” Must have been an ear-perking question, because my answer has been tweeted and re-tweeted a dozen times. Here’s how it came out, at least to the Twitter-verse:

@elizabethu: Brian Trelstad, Acumen Fund: our donors care more that we care about metrics than they care about the metrics themselves #socap09

As other tweeple picked up on this response, I’ve been mulling over the limits of 140-character messages; frankly, some important context got lost in translation. In retrospect, here’s what I was trying to get at, more or less:

I remember my corporate finance professor saying that valuing a public company was a combination of cash and hope. Cash flows from current businesses and hope for the future. Cash plus hope = corporate valuation. Start-ups and social enterprises are a little heavier on the hope than the cash in their early stages, but this is how you measure value in any enterprise. In our fundraising, in the early stages of our business and in the early stages of our field, we have also relied more on hope than cash in that these are early stage businesses with more promise than current performance. And when we go out to fundraise, our metrics are not really the selling point. So at this point, I think that our donors care more that we care about metrics than they care about the metrics themselves. But as competition increases and the field matures, I believe this will change and we need to be ready for some tough questions as a fund and as a field about the impact of our work and the social metrics.

This is also a riff on an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review from back in 2004. In it, the authors cite research on high net worth individuals in venture philanthropy, concluding that the obsession with performance metrics is actually somewhat overblown, and metrics are not a gating factor for contribution decisions.

Hopefully that clarifies. Thanks for all the tweets, folks - and for caring enough about metrics to send 140-character musings out to the ‘verse. And as much as I can - which is not often - I tweet at @trelstad