Seed Effect co-founder Missy Williams joins Peter Greer and David Weekley to make the case that measuring our impact is one of the most loving things we can do.

Early in Seed Effect’s story, we made an assumption. We believed that three out of four of our Savings & Loan Groups would be equipped to keep meeting on their own after just one year of training. It was a hopeful number, and we had every reason to believe it.

Then we measured.

Our monitoring and evaluation revealed the real number was only 25 percent. One group in four, not three.

We could have kept that finding quiet. Instead, we published it in our annual report that year. We worried our supporters would step back when we admitted the program hadn’t performed as expected. They did the opposite and instead, leaned in. 

We learned something profound: transparency doesn’t erode trust; it builds it. That story, and the conviction behind it, is now part of a new book.

A practical guide to measuring what matters

Mission and Metrics: A Practical Guide to Measuring What Matters is available now. Our co-founder and executive director, Missy Williams, wrote it alongside Peter Greer, CEO of HOPE International, and David Weekley, founder of David Weekley Homes and chairman of Dovetail Impact Foundation, with writer Jill Heisey.

It is a short, practical book, just 128 pages, built for the nonprofit director, the pastor, the ministry founder who senses that good intentions are not the same as good outcomes, and who is ready to explore the difference. But you don’t have to run a nonprofit to find something here. Whether you support a ministry with your time or your giving, or simply want to see how good data can serve Kingdom work, you’ll find a clearer way to think about the impact behind your generosity.

The premise is simple and a little countercultural. Measurement is not a burden we carry to satisfy our donors. It is an act of love for the people we serve. When we invite a mother in a refugee settlement to spend an hour each week with us, we are asking her to trust us with her time, which could be spent in the market, in the fields, or at home with her children. We are asking them to trust us that this hour would help their families move from refuge to restoration. We owe them more than good intentions. We owe them the honest work of knowing whether that hour is truly well spent.

This is not a book of theory. It is drawn from decades of measuring impact in some of the hardest places, and Seed Effect’s work runs through it.

Readers will find our founding story, which began in 2009 with nineteen families in South Sudan and has grown into a network of more than 130,000 Members in over 4,900 Christ-centered Savings & Loan Groups, the largest network of its kind in the region. They will find the 25 percent moment and what it taught us about courageous curiosity. And they will see how we actually measure our work: the Member surveys that track how families’ lives change over three years in our groups, and a quasi-experimental study, run with an academic partner, that compared our Members to their neighbors outside the program and gave strong evidence of our contribution to change without the cost of a full randomized trial.

The book is organized around three movements that mirror the journey itself: Clarity about what you are trying to accomplish, Curiosity to look honestly at what is actually happening, and Commitment to keep improving in light of what you learn.

Why this matters to our partners

If you have ever supported Seed Effect, this book is a window into how we think. It explains why we would rather know the truth than protect a comfortable story, and why the families we walk alongside deserve nothing less. It is also, we hope, a gift to other leaders doing this work. As Missy writes, you won’t do it perfectly, and there is power in doing it anyway. The goal is progress, not perfection.

“When somebody asks me for the one book to read on monitoring and evaluation for nonprofits, this is the one that I will point them to. Mission and Metrics is wonderfully concise, engaging, convicting, and encouraging.“

David Bronkema, PhD, Professor and Templeton Chair of Christian Service Through Entrepreneurship

Get your copy

Mission and Metrics: A Practical Guide to Measuring What Matters is available now in paperback for $11.99.

Get the book on Amazon