Yesterday evening Vancity Community Foundation and SAP co-hosted a special event to share advice about creating performance snapshots. With over 50 guests in attendance at the SAP Executive Briefing Centre, the event was a huge success. For those of you who missed out, here’s some highlights and useful recommendations that were shared yesterday evening.
We invited representatives from three social enterprises to speak on their performance snapshots. First was Gretchen Jordan Bastow and Amit Arora from Mama’s Wall Street Studio. Next was Graham Anderson and external consultant Susan Chambers from Shift Urban Cargo Delivery and lastly, Christa Mullaly from The Cleaning Solution.
After each presenter had 
a chance to explain their snapshot, all presenters reassembled for a panel discussion moderated by Steve Williams of Constructive Public Engagement, an authority on CSR strategy, impact measurement and data visualization.
A few of the topics brought up during the 30 minute panel discussion included: using performance snapshots in decisions on business strategy, the process of collecting data, and the number of hours needed to create a performance snapshot.
Steve asked each speaker about the audience they were trying to reach with their performance snapshots. Amit and Gretchen created their snapshot as a communications tool for an external audience of funders, supporters and clients, to get the word out about their organization. Christa from The Cleaning Solution was most interested in using their snapshot internally as a roadmap to help inform the direction of the organization.
When asked if the process of creating a snapshot was worth it, Graham admitted that it was a huge task, but now that it’s completed, he’s able to use his snapshot as a tool to measure against existing metrics.
There were some final words of advice from the speakers on necessities every organization should have in place before creating their own performance snapshot.
According to Christa, you must determine the data that is easiest to define, and the data that will be most beneficial to use. Gretchen recommends distilling data down so every word holds meaning, and Susan suggests opting for fewer indicators to start, so as not to be overwhelmed. Lastly, Graham suggests housing all your data in one place to save yourself from tracking it down later.
What advice can you offer to those creating performance snapshots?