“How I Attempted to Measure the Impact of My Nonprofit’s Youth Suicide Prevention Program” by Yulia Chekhovska

TL;DR: Working as Lead Outreach Manager at a mental health nonprofit in Japan, I realized we couldn't answer a basic question funders kept asking: "What's your actual impact?" We had activity metrics (workshops delivered, calls answered) but no outcome metrics. So I built a cost-effectiveness framework using national police data and our publicly available financial records to create a model-based estimate of potential impact. Under plausible assumptions (25% intervention effectiveness), the program costs ~¥720,000 ($4,830) per DALY averted - 7× below WHO's threshold for highly cost-effective interventions. This analysis helped transform how we communicate impact to grant organizations, though significant uncertainties remain. Background: The Question That Started Everything I've been working at a Tokyo-based mental health organization for almost a year now, managing outreach programs and grant coordination. The learning curve has been steep - delivering mental health workshops to schools and businesses across four Japanese regions simultaneously, managing distributed teams, engaging donors remotely. There were ups and downs, failed pilot programs, and moments of genuine impact I couldn't quite quantify. Then came the rejection email. We'd applied for a major grant to expand our youth suicide prevention programs. The proposal highlighted impressive activity metrics: workshops delivered, hotline calls [...] ---Outline:(01:11) Background: The Question That Started Everything(02:44) The Problem: Activity Metrics ≠ Impact Metrics(04:03) Collecting the Data: What I Had and What I Needed(04:41) 1. National baseline: How big is the problem?(05:56) 2. Program reach: Who did we actually engage?(08:25) 3. Expected deaths without intervention(08:53) 4. Intervention effectiveness: The biggest uncertainty(10:46) Calculating Cost-Effectiveness of The Program(10:51) DALYs averted(11:20) Cost per DALY(11:48) WHO threshold comparison(12:16) What This Analysis Actually Shows (And Doesnt Show)(12:21) What it shows:(13:00) What it absolutely does NOT show:(13:35) Lessons Learned: What Id Do Differently(14:04) My Takeaways --- First published: December 21st, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Sg7ovepZcmY8GKpo3/how-i-attempted-to-measure-the-impact-of-my-nonprofit-s --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

There are no comments yet.

Please log in to write the first comment.