Social change organizations work to influence public and private sector decisions on an ongoing basis.  Tracking our success at influencing these decisions is the heart of how we should be evaluating our work.  Like all evaluation work, tracking decision outcomes is way easier if you have good tools to help.

ONE/Northwest Database Programs Manager Steve Andersen recently built a simple-yet-sophisticated decision outcomes tracking system for Futurewise as part of an organizational database overhaul.  In this five-minute screencast, he offers a walkthrough of how Salesforce helps Futurewise keep track of its work to promote healthy communities and cities in Washington state.

This module was developed by interviewing Futurewise staff about their mental models for tracking their work, then quickly building up simple database objects using Salesforce that captured the relationships between decisions, outcomes, decisionmakers, jurisdictions and campaigns.

We were able to take full advantage of Salesforce's built-in tools for creating reports and dashboards, meaning there was little custom code to write beyond defining the database fields (a point-and-click operation). 

We've packaged up this system so that it is easy for us to implement for future clients.  If you're a Salesforce integrator, you're welcome to download it and install it into a developer account so that you can experiment with it and customize it further.