Nobody Knows If the Program Worked

Ask any grant-funded organization this question. The program you spent $400,000 on last year. Did it work?

Most cannot answer it. Not "the answer is complicated." They cannot answer it at all, because the information needed has never been in one place.

The finance team knows the money was spent, from which source, and that the paperwork was clean. The program team knows what was delivered and roughly who was served. The outcomes, if anyone measured them, live somewhere else entirely. Each of these is a real answer to a different question. Nobody's job is to put them together.

This is strange when you think about it. Public and grant-funded organizations face more scrutiny than ever. Pandemic-era funding is gone. Budgets are tightening everywhere. Boards, legislators, and funders are asking harder questions. And the single most useful question in public finance, what did this money actually do, is structurally unanswerable in most organizations.

The research here is humbling. Marguerite Roza's work at Edunomics has shown for years that spending on the same program can vary wildly across sites within one organization, and leadership usually does not know it. The problem is not that anyone refuses to measure results. The problem is that measuring them requires joining financial data to program data to outcomes, across systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

Here is the good news. This is a plumbing problem, not a culture problem. When every program activity carries its funding source with it, and outcomes flow into the same connected record, return on investment stops being a research project and becomes a report.

Imagine a board meeting, or a funder call, where the answer to "did it work" is a page instead of a shrug. Where next year's renewal decision rests on what the program did this year. That is not a moonshot. The data already exists in every organization. It is just sitting in three buildings and four systems.

The organizations that connect it first will make everyone else look like they are guessing. Because everyone else is.

Connecting it is what Eddi does. If you want your dollars linked to your outcomes, start at eddifi.ai