Make the Impact of Your Human Services Program Matter with Evidence and Story

The expression that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives is especially prescient to our work. At a minimum it is a 40-hour professional week. There are 40-hours to do something that matters. In a lengthy career with many human services programs that start and finish there are going to be ebbs and flows with programs that miss the mark and ones that are a bright start of impact. When these differences occur it is the difference between having robust logistics processes, but less robust impact processes. A human services program that matters needs both types of processes to generate evidence and story to achieve success and impact that matters.

Logistics processes are all the things we do to execute a program toward contractually defined success. Examples of logistics processes include:

• Making schedules

• Managing budgets

• Monitoring risks

• Developing deliverables

These processes are critical to ‘required success’ (i.e., the success that is generally highly controllable like delivering a final report) and ensuring future confidence in your organization’s ability to execute programs. These processes run on a continuum too, with the successful space ranging from satisfactory to excellent. Running a program with excellent logistics to achieve ‘excellence’ is, well, excellent, but the likelihood is high that the program outcomes can yield a deeper sense of purpose to the staff and organization with equally high-caliber impact processes. For example, a final report that meets all the expectations on paper (excellent evidence), but it ends up being shelf ware (didn’t matter because it lacked story).

While excellent logistics likely generate content or evidence in service to the focus of your human services program, it is also critical to have a similarly devoted focus on impact processes. These processes are what get you to the story of your program—the softer parts, the art to go with the science. The story takes creativity, nuance, awareness of context. Examples of impact processes include:

• Defining the problem with the what and who

• Crafting the path from problem to solution

• Capturing context

• Sharing experiences

This aspect of human services programs is the differentiator in ‘success’ and ‘success with impact’. Impact processes are a responsibility of program leadership, likely in the level above the staff in charge of executing the program (i.e., the logistics like staff, budget, and outputs); however, the entire program team should be empowered as to their accountability in contributing to impact processes. For example, a final report that meets all the logistics expectations, while also includes where the program fits in the path to the problem’s solution, the broader context, and the start of next steps for exploring alternate collaborations. The reader of the final report feels the conviction of what the program accomplished, knows why it mattered, and how to use the program for the next effort in solving the problem. The latter is the program that makes the 40-hours (or more) a week a life that matters too.

Bottom line: Build impact processes into your programs for not only a program that matters, but a life too.