Why would someone buy a hybrid car? That’s easy — doing so would save money through better gas mileage, a result easily measured in dollars and cents. But driving a hybrid also reduces a motorist’s carbon footprint, another quality result but one not so easily measured.

Such is the challenge of measuring results in development initiatives. Donors and implementers can measure quantity, such as jobs created, or quality, such as attitudes changed, or they can measure both. They can also measure compliance — whether a project is run by the book, providing the required forms and filings accurately and on time.

In public-private partnerships and other multidonor initiatives, measuring success can be more complicated because additional stakeholders often result in more and different metrics for success. Corporations, for example, might have different goals from nonprofit organizations, while the project's beneficiaries might have altogether different concerns.

A lively panel discussion on Wednesday — Impact is Everything: Measuring Results of Multi-Donor Initiatives — strove to bring the diverse parties involved in multidonor projects onto the same page. The event was hosted by the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and organized with help from DAI.

The expert panelists, speaking before a group of approximately 70 development professionals, succeeded in boiling down the many metrics of success into a few important points.

“People value outcomes, not activities,” said panelist Jason Saul, noting that although multidonor projects have numerous stakeholders, the project’s goals can be designed and simplified to make everyone happy.

“Set your intentions immediately,” he said. “Measurement happens at the beginning of a project. Find out what the stakeholders want. What is a ‘win’ in their eyes?”

Saul, the CEO of Chicago-based Mission Measurement and a leading expert on strategy and performance measurement in the social sector, was joined on the panel by Marianne Siemietkowski Needham, of the Cisco Entrepreneur Institute, and Howard Buffett, of the White House Office of Social Innovation. Robert Schneider of USAID’s Global Development Alliance (GDA) moderated. DAI provides strategic support to the GDA.

Needham’s group strives to partner with local public and private sector organizations to foster entrepreneurship around the world.

“Cisco believes that entrepreneurs are really agents for change,” she said, adding that Cisco principally targets entrepreneurs of small and medium businesses in emerging countries.

Quantifiable outcomes, such as improvement to a country’s Ease of Doing Business indicator, as calculated by the World Bank, are helpful metrics, Needham said, but success stories and testimonials are also effective ways to demonstrate the effectiveness of projects. She said her company has a team dedicated to collecting and archiving such stories.

The Obama administration, Buffett said, made “innovation” a buzzword in its approach toward good governing, to include the encouragement of public-private partnerships in order “to solve our nation’s greatest problems.”

An all-hands-on-deck approach, seeking new solutions to old problems, investing in what works, and empowering individuals to enact change are guiding principles within Buffett’s office.

Several audience members posed questions to the panelists. Among them: What makes a good partnership, how does one measure systemic change, or measure outcomes that occur specifically due to a partnership modality?

“Setting a reasonable outcome is the biggest challenge because we all want to dream, to put that stake in the ground,” Saul said. He recommended setting metrics that are both relevant to the outcome and practical enough to be easily and accurately measured.

“You want reasonable indicators; ones that can tell a story that is compelling,” Saul said.

The panel was part of the two-day Metrics from the Ground Up workshop, hosted by the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs and the Grassroots Business Fund.