Measuring Success

The Cisco product grant program reviews each grant looking for quantitative and qualitative success measurements. Success measurements can come in the form of operational improvements, or by enhancing your mission (more or better services).

The grant application will ask you to define your request in terms of the success the product grant will bring to your organization.

Please follow these instructions to view a highly recommended online course, titled "Measure What Matters."

1. Click here to create a Cisco.com userid and password. If you already have a Cisco.com userid, skip to step 2. 

2. Click here to take the online course. You will have to enter the Cisco.com userid and password that you just created. The course should take approximately an hour of your time. We welcome your feedback regarding the course via the linked survey at the conclusion of the elearning. This course was created in collaboration with the Center for What Works.

We strongly suggest you also consider sharing the above course with relevant others working on the proposed project, and within your organization.

During the application process, you will be asked to answer the following question:

How will the success of adding technology to your organization be measured? Please be specific about the criteria you will use to gauge your success, and describe the results you expect to have achieved 6 months after the product grant is installed.

In addition to the overall success achieved by your organization, Cisco realizes that other successes can be obtained in specific areas. These are:

Measurement of Operational Success
Measurement of Mission Success
Measurement of Technology Success

The sections below hope to expand on these questions to help you provide qualitative answers. All of the questions below will be part of the application process.

Based on your organization's logical framework, please describe how the grant will bring about quantifiable cost savings. Include spreadsheet calculations in supporting documents as appropriate.

In general, operational success can be described as your operations requiring less inputs, with in the same or higher level of activities, to produce more outputs.

Inputs would be any costs in your organization that can impact your budget. This could be personnel costs like salary, IT support contracting fees, support incidents, or reduced/eliminated commute costs for employees. Applicants should be able to demonstrate how the grant would positively impact your operations and produce cost savings.

If appropriate, describe any potential increased outputs as a result of the grant. This would suggest that your operations achieved greater efficiency and productivity. This would indicate mission success as well, which you will delineate in a later section.

Sample description:

In this question, please describe how the grant will help you better realize your mission, and how you plan to measure that success. This can involve a deepened impact and expanded reach to the people you serve.

The chart above metaphorically illustrates the increased outcomes of your organization from a grant. If impact can be thought of as the "depth" to which you affect the population you serve, and reach as the "breadth" of a population, then the outcomes can be thought of as the "affected area" of your organization's work. Impact could be then the addition of programs for an existing group that you serve, and reach could be the number of additional clients reached.

Sample description:

With the implementation of VPN for Free Clinic, we expect to serve 50% more clients, from the current 20,000, to 30,000 clients, with the same level of staffing. That improvement is calculated from an estimated 1.5 hours saved per client such as wait time, and paperwork processing. As a result, it would take now take 3 hours to triage a patient, from the current 4.5 hours per patient. More details are provided in the attached spreadsheet.

In addition, we would be able to extend our partnership with another agency which provides specialized care. We will be able to share information more regularly - instead of our bi-weekly phone conferences and meetings - so that our clients can get better treatment. For the pilot 6 months we anticipate that 25% of our patients would benefit from the partnership. In 9 - 12 months we expect to scale to 50% - 75% of our served population. More details about this partnership can be found in the supporting documents.

For this question, please describe how this grant will improve your technology infrastructure, and how you plan to materialize those improvement into other areas. You should demonstrate how technological capacity is expanded, and what that means for your organization overall.

For example, while it is obvious that more reliable connectivity would be beneficial to an organization, you should be able to show how the requested products are the best solution to a problem you face, and how that would have broad implications for your organization. Likewise, while it is clear that a more secure network is important, you need to indicate how your current network is insecure, or if you had incidents of a security breach, or non- compliance to regulations. Similarly, if you were to show that you would have a faster network, explain what that increased speed or response time would mean. Will you be able to support more remote users (thereby translating into cost savings)? Will you be able to improve and maintain uptime on a critical server? Will you be able to collect more data to better understand your clientele?

For this section, we encourage you to work with your technical staff or consultants to develop a response that conveys both technical competence, as well as your understanding of the wider implications of technology to your workflow and processes.