Giving Thoughts

Impact Moment: Walmart Foundation Identifies Outcomes for a Signature Giving Area

By Cori Cunningham, Program Director, The Conference Board

During the past few years, the Walmart Foundation has immersed itself in the issues surrounding hunger relief and nutrition to develop both a funding strategy and measurement methodology for creating long-term impact. In 2010, Walmart and the Walmart Foundation made a $2 billion commitment to hunger relief and nutrition and funded a broad variety of programs. Measurement during this initial phase focused primarily on outputs, such as pounds of food donated and amount of funding granted to an organization.

Outcome Identification

As learned from its initial investments, the Walmart Foundation refined its funding strategy at the national level and began directing its resources to the most effective programs that could drive impact and advance the field. To accomplish this, it began to engage with academic researchers who had deep expertise in the hunger space, other funders, and their NGO partners to better understand challenges in the field, as well as promising solutions for reducing food insecurity. In addition, the Foundation brought on a new staff member with a background in the hunger field who was able to enhance its internal resources and deepen the sophistication of its efforts.

From a data standpoint, the Foundation was able to easily identify hunger relief metrics that it could use to measure its contributions—the field has existing standard definitions and indicators from sources such as the USDA on converting pounds of food donated to number of meals provided.

Being able to leverage these existing metrics was very helpful to the Foundation as it worked to determine the potential and relative impact of some of its programs. On the nutrition side, where the field is evolving quickly and there are a large number of disparate measures, the Foundation is still challenged to establish key metrics that can be used to measure its progress across grantees, as definitions are not yet standardized and it is difficult to measure behavior change related to nutritional education.

Based on this research and exploration, the Walmart Foundation developed two core outcomes for its national giving strategy:

• Increase access to federal and charitable meals for low-income families by a specific, set number of meals. This includes both the increase of meals distributed by food banks through Walmart food donations and system-building capacity assistance, as well as the Foundation’s funding of programs aiming to increase qualified participation in federal nutrition programs. These programs include the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), school breakfasts, and after-school and summer feeding programs.
• Increase the number of people receiving nutrition education by a specific number, with a goal of a 25 percent change in behavior.

Results

While the creation of standard outcomes across its hunger relief and nutrition giving area provides the Walmart Foundation with a clear way to focus and direct its program funding to targeted impacts, it also places a priority on examining its process. It is important to also monitor and learn about the way the Foundation’s programs are delivered so that successful elements can be replicated and scaled over time.

Ultimately, the Walmart Foundation’s impact measurement is a work in progress. While it has successfully refined its national giving strategy, the Foundation will continue to monitor its goals and programs to assess if they are still on track for targeting the issues it wishes to address. The overarching outcomes are likely to stay the same, though the specific strategies it identifies and funds to achieve those outcomes will likely change over time, and there is a stated desire to drive innovation, not just delivery. Key to its progress in this area is its work with academic researchers; by leveraging their subject-matter expertise, the Foundation has been able to assess new funding opportunities, evaluate current impact, and stay current with new data and strategies closely related to the impacts it seeks to make with its social investments.

About The Conference Board’s Social Impact Measurement Portfolio

This case study is taken from Measuring the Impact of Corporate Social Investments, the report of a 14-company research working group that examined challenges related to impact measurement. It is one of a range of publications on the topic that The Conference Board has published in the past 12 months. The other publications, including Framing Social Impact Measurement, are available here.

About the author:

Cori Cunningham is the founder of C. Cunningham Advising and an accomplished consultant and solutions-oriented leader with more than a decade of experience advising corporations and social sector organizations on strategies designed to drive positive change. She specializes in uniting teams and stakeholders around common missions, and is a highly skilled strategic planner, analyst and facilitator. Cori works with clients to align community engagement strategies with business goals in the corporate sector, and create thorough and thoughtful plans for identifying and securing corporate relationships in the social sector.