I’m zealously anti-jargon.

If this seems like an odd confession for someone who encourages people to connect their leadership practice to metacognitive myopia, Pareto efficiency and residual confounding, I get it. I want Jewish organizations to become much more wonkier, and that cannot happen without a deeper understanding of complicated topics. 

But jargon can be a dangerous distraction.

If your organization spends endless time in abstract, theoretical conversations while declining on every key metric, the desire for a patina of sophistication may be doing more harm than good. I once worked with an organization whose board was deeply dysfunctional and whose finances were in shambles, yet they were immensely proud of the dashboard they created to measure progress — as if a dashboard were anything more than an infographic. Never forget: the best demonstration of sophistication is effectiveness.

Yet the Jewish world continues to struggle to define what “effective” actually means, mirroring a broader challenge across the nonprofit and corporate sectors. Marco Di Natole warns nonprofits about “the tyranny of nominality” — treating output metrics such as workshops or total participants as evidence of substantive change. Matt Watkins recently wrote in The Chronicle of Philanthropy that the more nonprofits “talk fancy,” the more likely people are to tune out. And Shane Littrell just published provocative research suggesting that the more receptive employees are to corporate jargon, the less effective they tend to be. (Ouch.)

But as a proudly unreasonable person, I believe that we can learn a lot about the strength of Jewish organizations using relatively simple metrics that are easy to understand, simple to produce, and essentially free. 

Allow me to introduce you to the Moneyball Judaism Scorecard.

5 vital signs of success

Every organization has certain keystone metrics: synagogue membership, camp and day school enrollment, annual campaign totals for federations, etc. 

But over the past three years, as my newsletter has grown, I’ve begun thinking about five numbers that, together, offer a surprisingly rich picture of organizational health — across programming, finances, fundraising, workplace culture and talent development. 

None of these metrics is my creation; all were developed by leaders far more talented than I am. Each takes a cue from Leidy Klotz’s playbook, recognizing the power of subtracting the pieces of information we need to decipher to get to the heart of the matter. 

1.) Net Promoter Score (NPS) 

Everything ultimately comes back to a difficult question: How do we know whether what we’re doing is actually any good? Organizations understandably prefer to present the most favorable picture of their work. That is why a single number can be so powerful.

Since Frederick Reichheld’s iconic article on the NPS, a single question remains a powerful indicator of organizational success: “How likely are you to recommend this program to someone else?” As Measuring Success first identified in Jewish life, just knowing how likely your current participants are to promote your programs remains a valuable, vital sign of future success. You can calculate the NPS for free and add it to program evaluations, email signatures, or automated surveys.

2.) Liquid Unrestricted Net Assets (LUNA) 

Even highly recommended programs won’t matter if the organization is insolvent. But nonprofit balance sheets often contain illiquid assets — restricted funds, property, or endowments — that obscure day-to-day financial reality.

Enter LUNA.

Developed by Hilda Polanco, whom I had the opportunity to learn from through UJA-Federation of New York’s  Institute for Jewish Executive Leadership, LUNA cuts through dense financial statements and answers a basic question: how much free cash does your organization have available for day-to-day operations right now? By stripping away restricted funds and illiquid assets, LUNA provides a clear, honest snapshot of financial health.

3.) Cost Per Dollar Raised (CPDR)

Fundraising numbers can also mislead.

Organizations proudly announce how much their gala raised or how large a new grant might be. But those headlines rarely reveal how much money remained after expenses. To paraphrase George Orwell, all dollars are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Cost Per Dollar Raised (CPDR) measures fundraising efficiency: total fundraising expenses divided by total dollars raised. If it costs $1 to raise $100, your CPDR is $0.01. The closer the ratio gets to 1:1, the worse the performance. It’s nice to celebrate how much an event raised — but unless you know the net after expenses, you know far less than you think.

4.) Total Positions Filled/Total Positions Budgeted (TF/TB) 

Employee engagement surveys can be useful. But sometimes the clearest indicator of workplace health is simpler: how many positions have you actually managed to fill?

The numerator — total positions filled — reflects recruitment and retention. If many roles remain vacant, the organization may be struggling with compensation, culture or expectations. The denominator — total positions budgeted — signals overall organizational stability. Growing headcount is usually a positive sign; shrinking headcount usually isn’t. Tracking this ratio over time reveals a great deal about an organization’s culture, stability and reputation as a workplace.

5.) ‘Hustle Stats’ (number of attempts taken)

This final number is a bit of a grab bag.

Organizations carefully track outcomes — membership numbers, enrollment totals, fundraising revenue. But far fewer track attempts.

How many fundraising asks were made?

How many prospective families were contacted?

How many membership conversations actually happened?

Borrowed from University of Florida basketball coach Kyle Smith, “hustle stats” measure the effort that precedes results. Often, the leaders who succeed most are simply those who make the most attempts.

If you’re a quant, you may be yawning. Yes, each of these measures has flaws; and yes, specialists can design far more sophisticated metrics. But if the goal is clarity about organizational health, these five numbers provide a surprisingly strong starting point. They require no elaborate dashboards or sprawling reports that most people will skim at best. You could calculate them tomorrow.

And if you find yourself drifting into endless debates about what should or should not be counted, you may have uncovered a deeper problem.

Sophistication as avoidance

Here’s a math problem:

Continue the sequence: 2, 4, 6. 

Did you choose 1, 2, 3?

That’s the simplest rule. But as Hilary Farris and Revlin found in a 1989 study, when given this task, many undergraduate students chose unnecessarily complicated rules for their sequence, even when a simple one was staring them in the face. Shane Parrish calls this the complexity bias, our tendency to prefer complicated explanations when simple ones work just as well. 

Jewish organizations have many reasons to avoid simple measurement. Some leaders suspect the numbers are bad and would rather not see them (self-enhancement bias). Others know what should be measured but feel unsure about how to solve the problem (bikeshedding). Still others assume that good outcomes always reflect good decisions, and bad outcomes reflect bad ones (resulting).

But strategist Richard Rumelt argues that effective leadership begins by identifying what he calls “the crux” — “the place where a commitment to action will have the best chance of surmounting the most critical obstacles.” The five vital signs in this scorecard are not the only things you could measure, or even the most sophisticated. But given limited time and resources, they tell you a great deal. And that matters.

In Bereishit, Yaakov is described as an ish tam — a simple man. Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, aka. the Netziv, writes in Haamek Davar that Yaakov is “simple” because he is not divided within himself, “saying one thing while holding something else in his heart.” 

Thriving Jewish organizations should never be afraid of the truth. And often the truth is revealed through simple measures that force us to compare our expectations with reality.

Those who choose to see clearly will, in the end, move ahead of those who prefer to remain in the dark.

Rabbi Joshua Rabin is the author of “Moneyball Judaism” on Substack and rabbi of the Astoria Center of Israel in Queens, N.Y.