The Network for Incubator and Commissary Kitchens (NICK) is the largest network of shared kitchen professionals sharing their knowledge and insights daily. Below is a summary of a recent conversation about measuring kitchen impact, edited for readability.
Question
“We are evaluating our metrics for tracking the success of our kitchen… Do you have measures for tracking success?”
Answers
- “Start with income vs. expense”
- “We always track output volume of businesses (especially those who make shelf-stable products). We can track sales of those in-house, for those who use our retail space.”
- “We send out annual surveys to our kitchen members & business training participants to measure their progress over time.”
Additional insights
- What are your goals for the data?
- Are you reporting it to outside funders/stakeholders or using it internally to measure the effectiveness of specific services?
- Are you currently collecting data from clients? If you collect reports from clients annually on their sales, staff, sales channels, etc., then you can chart their growth over time. Tracking the sales from market opportunities or loans/investment you facilitate for them is also great. And tracking the success of those that outgrow/graduate from your space is valuable.
- Tracking everything you do (like coaching hours, events, referrals, tours, etc) is great for measuring your productivity. If you want to show the impact that it’s having on clients a client survey is often necessary.
