“Sustainable Impact: A Civic Return on Investment” is the theme of the 2009 National Conference on Citizenship. A Civic ROI evaluation model is intended to encourage the measurement of investments through a lens that recognizes, rewards, and upholds the importance of ensuring that outcomes of investments lead to greater civic vitality, and therefore, healthier communities. Quantifying non-numerical indicators of civic health and participation is important because they look beyond the outputs of dollars donated and volunteers mobilized in order to measure the outcomes of investments, including trust, feelings of connectedness, and civic attitude.

In short, if we want our investments, whether they be of time, talent or treasure, to “move the needle” in solving problems and strengthening communities, we must commit to evaluating the return on these investments through a lens that values the importance of the civic behaviors and attitudes of community members.

Therefore, it is important to measure investments by not only nonprofits, but businesses and government as well, in a way that recognizes the role of the investment in cultivating civic vitality. Investors must value the somewhat amorphous civic health indicators such as trust, feelings of connectedness, in order to truly understand the impact they wish to create and therefore, make investments that can effectively produce the required inputs and activities to create said impact.

In preparation for the National Conference on Citizenship on September 9, we will be using our featured discussion each month to ask you to weigh in on the concept of Civic ROI—what it is, who should care, why it’s important (or not), how we can begin evaluating it, and when we will know if we’ve achieved it.

We have some insightful commentary from Cynthia Gibson and Allison Fine, so see what they have to say on the topic and let us know what you think.