Blog Share: Love and Carnations “The truth is that you can measure love”
This is a blog post by Gen Maitland Hudson, Head of Evaluation and Impact Assessment at Power to Change.
Adapted from a keynote address to the Social Value Matters conference in Istanbul, Tuesday 11 April.
A couple of years ago, I was involved in what became a major charity scandal: the collapse of Kids Company. My involvement started with an article I wrote about the charity’s impact measurement, its statistical claims, and how well those claims stood up to scrutiny.
It was my view that a bit of due diligence on the available public data showed that the charity had questions to answer, and that publication of its operational data was the best way to answer them. I invited them to make that data publicly available.
Kids Company chose not to take up my invitation.
What the charity did instead was to say, loudly and repeatedly, that their work wasn’t measurable because you can’t measure love.
That struck me then, and still strikes me now, as a very odd defence.