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Goals & Measures

Declared targets with measured progress against them — the number you said you'd hit, and how close you actually are.

A measure is a quantity worth tracking over time: a count, a percentage, a currency amount, or a number of hours. Some measures are derived — CommonGage computes them automatically from data it already has, so nobody types the number. Others are entered — someone records a value on whatever schedule makes sense. Either way, a target says what the measure should reach by a date, and an observation says what it actually was.

What it tracks​

  • Measures, each with a unit, a direction (higher-is-better or lower-is-better), and a source — derived or entered
  • Targets per measure per scope — organization-wide, or broken out per zone or site — each with a target date
  • Observations per measure per scope per period; a derived measure computes its own and can't be entered by hand
  • Optional classification: leading vs. lagging indicator, output vs. outcome — the framing a funder's reporting template often asks for

What it reports​

  • Progress — every measure, worst variance first, ahead of or behind its target
  • Highlights — a plain-language summary of high points and low points, generated once a measure has enough observations to compare against its target
  • A measure catalog: what's being tracked, where it applies, and who owns it

Any module that publishes a measure appears here with nothing further to configure — Expense & In-Kind, Participants, Coverage, Partnerships, and Projects each register their own numbers automatically once enabled. When Projects is enabled, the relationship runs both ways: a plan can link to the measure it's meant to move, so a plan's own progress and the number's own movement sit next to each other.

Who uses it​

Org admins define measures and set targets. Zone coordinators and building staff record entered observations within their own scope. Leadership reads the scorecard — the one place that answers "what's the metric we're trying to meet," the question every funder, board, and superintendent eventually asks.

Why it matters​

Most organizations set annual goals and report against them by hand, if they report at all. Goals & Measures makes the cycle structured: declare what you intend to achieve, record or compute what actually happened, and see the gap without reassembling it from scratch each time. Because a derived measure reads data CommonGage already holds — cost per engagement, hours contributed, coverage that depends on one person — the platform can track engagement-specific numbers automatically, the moment the module that owns that data is enabled.