How to measure success ? (Both Social + for profit)

Posted on | October 25, 2008 | No Comments

[Early Stage idea]

When I started developing my business a very common question investors asked me was how do you measure the success of your business. The answer 9 out of 10 times was, revenue. It almost got to the point that subliminally I related ‘measure success’ to ‘business model‘.

Touch

Although when I think carefully revenue is not the measure of success for many organisations especially social enterprises. So I have thought of a new way to define success: ‘Success is the number of people an organisation can touch directly or indirectly.’

Touch = affected / use application / talk about

Can this be a universal measure ?

Ok let’s try and see if this works for Facebook, Oxfam, kiva.org, Kwiqq…
Facebook has over 100 million users. I think of it as a platform to reach other people. It is used by millions of users all over the world very frequently (I hear average twice a day). Hence it does pass the test, no wonder it has an excellent evaluation.

Again Oxfam is also involved in helping several individuals and organizations on a daily basis. It not only connects people raising finances but also people who receive it. Passes the test ! Kiva.org is a similar example, the more penetration it achieves the more people it would touch and the more successful it would be !

Kwiqq, early days for us but we touch millions of users indirectly via our partners and organizations we work with. The more people we can get to indirectly via our partners the more success we shall see.

Success

The idea is NOT a groundbreaking but is just another way of measuring your success !

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