Impact Measurement and Outcomes

Evaluation Using Salesforce for

Nonprofits: A Guide to Data-Driven
Frameworks 1st Edition Dustin
Macdonald
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/impact-measurement-and-outcomes-evaluation-using
-salesforce-for-nonprofits-a-guide-to-data-driven-frameworks-1st-edition-dustin-macd
onald-2/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Impact Measurement and Outcomes Evaluation Using

Salesforce for Nonprofits: A Guide to Data-Driven
Frameworks 1st Edition Dustin Macdonald

https://ebookmass.com/product/impact-measurement-and-outcomes-
evaluation-using-salesforce-for-nonprofits-a-guide-to-data-
driven-frameworks-1st-edition-dustin-macdonald/

Social Impact Measurement for a Sustainable Future

https://ebookmass.com/product/social-impact-measurement-for-a-
sustainable-future/

Visual Data Insights Using SAS ODS Graphics: A Guide to

Communication-Effective Data Visualization 1st Edition
Leroy Bessler

https://ebookmass.com/product/visual-data-insights-using-sas-ods-
graphics-a-guide-to-communication-effective-data-
visualization-1st-edition-leroy-bessler-2/

Visual Data Insights Using SAS ODS Graphics: A Guide to

Communication-Effective Data Visualization 1st Edition
Leroy Bessler

https://ebookmass.com/product/visual-data-insights-using-sas-ods-
graphics-a-guide-to-communication-effective-data-
visualization-1st-edition-leroy-bessler/
Data Driven: Harnessing Data and AI to Reinvent
Customer Engagement 1st Edition Tom Chavez

https://ebookmass.com/product/data-driven-harnessing-data-and-ai-
to-reinvent-customer-engagement-1st-edition-tom-chavez/

Data-Driven SEO with Python: Solve SEO Challenges with

Data Science Using Python 1st Edition Andreas Voniatis

https://ebookmass.com/product/data-driven-seo-with-python-solve-
seo-challenges-with-data-science-using-python-1st-edition-
andreas-voniatis/

Practical Business Analytics Using R and Python: Solve

Business Problems Using a Data-driven Approach 2nd
Edition Umesh R. Hodeghatta

https://ebookmass.com/product/practical-business-analytics-using-
r-and-python-solve-business-problems-using-a-data-driven-
approach-2nd-edition-umesh-r-hodeghatta/

SAP UI Frameworks for Enterprise Developers : A

Practical Guide Marius Obert

https://ebookmass.com/product/sap-ui-frameworks-for-enterprise-
developers-a-practical-guide-marius-obert/

Using Predictive Analytics to Improve Healthcare

Outcomes 1st Edition John W. Nelson

https://ebookmass.com/product/using-predictive-analytics-to-
improve-healthcare-outcomes-1st-edition-john-w-nelson/
Dustin MacDonald

Impact Measurement and Outcomes

Evaluation Using Salesforce for
Nonprofits
A Guide to Data-Driven Frameworks
Dustin MacDonald
Sigourney, IA, USA

ISBN 978-1-4842-9707-0 e-ISBN 978-1-4842-9708-7

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9708-7

© Dustin MacDonald 2023

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively
licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is
concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in
any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or
dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks,

service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the
absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the
relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general
use.

The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the
advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate
at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the
editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This Apress imprint is published by the registered company APress

Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY
10004, U.S.A.
Introduction
If you’ve picked up this book, it’s probably because you find yourself in
the role of a nonprofit manager, outcomes and evaluation specialist,
consultant, architect, or other professional who is required either to
directly perform outcomes measurement and impact evaluation or to
set up and supervise systems that do.
Before beginning this learning adventure, it will be helpful to
understand how this book came to be. I hold a variety of Salesforce
certifications, Accredited Professional badges, a bachelor’s degree in
human services, and two master’s degrees. In all that education, I have
never had the opportunity to complete a formal course in outcomes
evaluation.
After spending years in all areas of nonprofits and helping them use
Salesforce as a consultant, the decision to distill those years of learning
in one place about how nonprofits use Salesforce – and there are a lot of
them – has led to this book about how you can build a proper impact
measurement system.
After completing dozens of implementations across all areas of the
nonprofit spectrum including housing, homelessness, economic
empowerment, poverty alleviation, intimate partner violence, mental
health, crisis intervention, suicide prevention, and more, it’s become
clear that a well-designed impact and outcomes measurement system
quickly pays for itself in your ability to tell a better story to your
funders.
During the research process, it has become clear there is a lack of
written material for Salesforce. Part of this is a function of the fact that
the tech world moves fast, and written material is often out of date by
the time it is published. Another reason is that the people busy doing
work often don’t have the time to sit down and write a book.
There are a few reasons not to be discouraged by this reality as you
begin to work through this material.
First, even as specific technical implementation details get out of
date, the core functionality remains unchanged. In our case, the
principles of outcomes measurement and the process of building a
rockstar impact measurement system are the same whether you’re
using Salesforce, an Access database from 1995, or a completely pen-
and-paper system.
In this book, you will learn the skills and how to apply them.
Salesforce will help us by making it quicker and more efficient, but rest
assured that nothing about the core work of impact measurement and
outcome evaluation will be out of date by the time you read this.
Second, although blog posts, website articles, and presentations at
Dreamforce (Salesforce’s annual conference) are a great way to get
information, it is often presented with too little detail to immediately
act on it. A book gives you the opportunity to dive deep into both the
theory and the practice of the subject at hand so that you have a strong
foundation to apply what you learn. That’s the purpose of this book and
I’m confident you will agree that it is met.

About This Book

Before writing this book, certain assumptions were made about the
audience. Making this book useful to the widest group possible without
also making it too high level that it would prevent quickly
implementing the solutions presented is challenging. Adding the
additional hurdle of not making it so technical that a Salesforce end
user or even a non-Salesforce nonprofit executive would be locked out
trying to read it is a difficult needle to thread, but I think it has been
achieved.
Although this book assumes little to no Salesforce knowledge before
you begin, many are likely reading because you’ve been using
Salesforce for a while and now want to supercharge your impact
measurement. For that reason, the basic Salesforce knowledge needed
is presented early, and we dive deeper as the book goes on.
If you are actively using Salesforce and are familiar with Nonprofit
Cloud, you can safely skip this first chapter which is an introduction to
these topics and walks you through each step from first contacting
Salesforce to installing the Nonprofit Cloud tools you will use
throughout this process.
At the speed that nonprofits must work, it’s rare that you get the
opportunity to design a system from the ground up with outcomes in
mind. For that reason, all the advice and solutions provided in this book
will include options for updating your system to move toward best
practices without losing your previous data or work.
The rest of this section will review each of the following chapters.
Chapter 2 is a high-level overview of the theory and practice of impact
measurement and outcome evaluation. This is a primer for those who
may be new to this role or a review for those who may be experienced
practitioners that may have been away from the basics for a while.
Chapter 2 also reviews common impact measurement and outcome
frameworks to help you decide how to proceed. We review Key
Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).
We also look at a traditional fundraising model of return on investment
(ROI), a special method for social value called social return on
investment (SROI), and cost-benefit analysis (CBA).
Chapter 3 explores a key aspect to building a new evaluation
program. The terms logic model and theory of change are used
interchangeably in outcomes measurement, but these are slightly
different. They refer to a visual and hypothetical map showing how
clients move through one, several, or all your programs or services to
achieve the desired outcomes.
Along the way, you will provide inputs such as staff and materials to
deliver your programs, and the client will realize outputs which are
immediately observable effects from the service(s) you provided. Those
outputs translate in the long term to outcomes. We’ll spend more time
going over outputs and outcomes later in the book.
It might seem that because the logic model comes before other
work, it should be placed earlier. This chapter is deliberately placed
after the common impact and outcome measurement frameworks
chapter because it’s helpful if you understand where you need to end
up (with a decided-on framework) before you start building your logic
model. It’s a bit like deciding your driving directions. As the paraphrase
from Lewis Carroll indicates, “If you don't know where you're going,
any road will take you there.”
In Chapter 4, we focus on the elements of a strategic plan and
discuss how to identify indicators, collect data, establish baselines and
targets, and ensure your data quality and reliability.
In Chapter 5, we take our logic model and outcomes that we decided
on earlier and begin deciding how to build them in Salesforce. We won’t
get too technical in this chapter, but we will talk about some basic
Salesforce functionality like objects, fields, and reports. See Figure 1 for
a view of the Salesforce Object Manager used for managing objects and
fields.

Figure 1 The Salesforce Object Manager

Later in the chapter we move from the theoretical to the practical as
we look at strategies for collecting data. We’ll talk about techniques like
paper surveys, Salesforce assessments, Experience Cloud portals, and
other methods of getting your output data into Salesforce. We’ll also
discuss best practices to make sure the data you’re collecting is the
most robust and reliable.
In Chapter 6, we take the data we’ve collected and examine how to
report out on it. We discuss how to meet the needs of your board, your
funders, and the wider community. Integrating your nonprofit impact
into your grant proposals is also covered here, as is how to seek out
earned media when you have particularly compelling results to share.
In Chapter 7, we focus on the complete change management
process, which is used to ensure that individuals are prepared for the
changes that your organization implements.
 In Chapter 8, we begin wrapping up with three end-to-end case
studies to help you understand and apply the concepts throughout the
rest of the book. Each case study is based on the outcomes and
evaluation work I’ve done in my career with organizations. The first is a
crisis line, the second is a nonprofit Chamber of Commerce, and the
third is a homeless shelter and food pantry.
In Chapter 9, we incorporate advanced techniques like Einstein
Prediction Builder, Experience Cloud, statistical analysis, and
AppExchange solutions to extend the work that you’ve done by
leveraging next-generation technologies.
In Chapter 10, our conclusion, we examine everything you’ve
learned throughout the book and opportunities for you to continue
your learning. Good luck and happy learning!
Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the
author in this book is available to readers on GitHub
(github.com/apress). For more detailed information, please visit
https://www.apress.com/gp/services/source-code.
Acknowledgments
I am incredibly grateful to everyone who helped bring this book to
fruition: the Apress team including Susan McDermott, Laura
Berendson, Gryffin Winkler, Shobana Srinivasan, and others who
helped behind the scenes and supported this book throughout its
development.
I am also thankful to my colleagues at Provisio Partners and
RedTag.pro who inspire me each day, especially my supervisor Hillary
Dale, Chief Delivery Officer Kim Collins, CIO Erica Cox, CEO Travis
Bloomfield, and some of my amazing coworkers including Frank
Nichols, Tom Overland, Sergii Korolivskyi, and Volodymyr Monchak
who make magic happen daily.
Thank you to Professor Greg Longo, whose support during my time
at Eastern University was invaluable in giving me the confidence and
knowledge to pursue this work.
A special thank you to my technical reviewer Jesse Brown, who
teaches me something new every day and took time out of his
extremely busy schedule to ensure the technical accuracy of this book.
I am grateful to my brother, Jonathan MacDonald, who has always
been there to bounce ideas off and who supported this book when it
was nothing more than a few bullet points on a notepad.
Finally, the deepest appreciation and thanks go to my wife, Melissa,
and my kids, Ray and Rose, who put up with endless late nights and
review sessions.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1:​Introduction to Salesforce for Nonprofits
Introduction to Nonprofit Cloud
Nonprofit Cloud Case Management
Program Management Module
Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)
Soft Credits
Manage Households
Engagement Plans
Gift Levels
Gift Entry Templates
Recurring Donations
Rollup Summaries
Reporting and Analytics
Outbound Funds Module
Accounting Subledger
Other Salesforce Tools
Getting Started with Salesforce
Understanding the Power of Us (P10) Program
Signing Your Contract
Getting Access to Your Organization
Installing Other Salesforce Tools
Conclusion
Chapter 2:​Introduction to Impact Measurement and Outcome
Evaluation
Common Definitions
 Impact Measurement
Outcome Evaluation
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
SMART Goals
Identify Outcomes
Define Success
Select Measures for Each Element of Success
Set a Target
Begin Measuring
Assess Results
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
Return on Investment
Social Return on Investment
Establishing the Scope and Identifying Stakeholders
Mapping Outputs
Demonstrating Outcomes and Giving Them a Value
Establishing Impact
Calculating the SROI
Reporting, Using, and Embedding the SROI
Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA)
Pre-Post Comparison
Conclusion
Chapter 3:​Creating Logic Models and Theories of Change
History
Steps to Creating a Theory of Change
Issue Analysis
 Stakeholder Analysis
Final Outcome
Intermediate Outcomes/​Outputs
Inputs and Activities
Change Methods
Sequencing and Diagramming
External Factors
Assumptions and Risks
Conclusion
Chapter 4:​Developing an Impact Management Strategy
Strategic Planning
Selecting Indicators and Metrics
Collecting and Managing Data
Establishing Baselines and Targets
Ensuring Data Quality and Reliability
Conclusion
Chapter 5:​Creating the Framework in Salesforce
Creating (or Documenting) Your Data Model
Example Data Model
Data Model and Your Theory of Change
Creating reports
Report Types
Custom Report Types
Report Formats
Fields
Filters
 Cross Filters
Subscribe to Reports
Export Reports
Einstein Discovery for Reports
Creating Dashboards
Dashboard Filters
Using Formulas and Validation Rules
Formula Fields
Intermediate Examples
Advanced Examples
Formulas in Reports
Validation Rules
Other Considerations for Data Input
Certifications and Additional Learning
Strategies for Collecting Data
Conclusion
Chapter 6:​Evaluating Impact
Evaluating Impact Qualitatively
Analyzing Qualitative Survey Results
Collecting Case Studies and Testimonials
Facilitating Interviews and Focus Groups
Interviews
Focus Groups
Evaluating Impact Quantitatively
Entry and Exit Assessments
Analyzing Quantitative Survey Results
 Statistical Measurement Techniques
Making Changes to Improve Impact
Improving Survey Results
Improving Assessment Results
Social Return on Investment
Reporting on Impact
Annual Reports
Social Media
Earned Media
Salesforce Standard Reporting
Other Issues in Evaluating Impact
Conclusion
Chapter 7:​The Change Management Process
Step 1:​Determine the Idea and Its Context
Step 2:​Define the Change Initiative
Step 3:​Evaluate the Climate for Change
Step 4:​Develop a Change Plan
Step 5:​Identify a Sponsor
Step 6:​Prepare the Recipients of Change
Step 7:​Create the Cultural Fit
Step 8:​Develop and Choose a Change Leader Team
Step 9:​Create Small Wins for Motivation
Step 10:​Constantly and Strategically Communicate the Change
Step 11:​Measure Progress of the Change Effort
Step 12:​Integrate Lessons Learned
A Case Study of Change Management
 Determine the Idea and Its Context
Define the Change Initiative
Evaluate the Climate for Change
Develop a Change Plan
Identify a Sponsor
Prepare the Recipients of Change
Create the Cultural Fit
Develop and Choose a Change Leader Team
Create Small Wins for Motivation
Constantly and Strategically Communicate the Change
Measure Progress of the Change Effort
Integrate Lessons Learned
Conclusion
Chapter 8:​Case Studies
Case Study 1:​Nonprofit Crisis Line
Introduction to the Organization
Current Technology
Planned Technology
Old Data Model
New Data Model
Impact and Outcome
Case Study 2:​Chamber of Commerce
Introduction to the Organization
Current Technology
Planned Technology
Old Data Model
 New Data Model
Impact and Outcome
Final Outcomes
Case Study 3:​Homeless Shelter and Food Pantry
Introduction to the Organization
Current Technology
Planned Technology
Old Data Model
New Data Model
Impact and Outcome
Final Outcomes
Conclusion
Chapter 9:​Advanced Techniques
What Is Einstein?​
Einstein Next Best Action (NBA)
Einstein Prediction Builder
Einstein Discovery (Tableau)
Einstein Bots
Ethics of Einstein
Using Einstein Prediction Builder
Define Your Use Case
Identify the Data That Supports Your Use Case
Create Your Prediction
Review, Iterate, and Enable Your Prediction
Monitor Your Prediction
Deploy and Use Your Prediction
 Updating the Prediction
Collecting Survey Data via Experience Cloud
Leveraging AppExchange Solutions to Better Model Outcomes
Conclusion
Chapter 10:​Conclusion
The Future of Salesforce and Program Evaluation
Next Steps in Your Learning
Salesforce Certifications and Accredited Professionals
Trailmixes
Degrees and Certificates
How to Implement What You’ve Learned in Your Organization
Remembering What You Learned
Putting It into Practice
Conclusion
Index
About the Author
Dustin K. MacDonald
is 10x Salesforce Certified, Nonprofit
Cloud Consultant. He holds an
Accredited Professional in Einstein
Prediction Builder and is currently a
Senior Consultant at a midsize Salesforce
implementation partner that focuses
exclusively on nonprofits and public
sector organizations. He is a former
Affiliate Professor in Data Science at
Eastern University in St. Davids,
Pennsylvania, and holds several degrees:
Bachelor of Professional Arts in Human
Services, Master of Science in Data
Science, and Master of Business
Administration. Dustin was motivated to
write this book because there are no
books available on Nonprofit Cloud for nonprofit users who may lack
technical knowledge, and the timing is right as Salesforce is increasing
its focus on this vertical.
About the Technical Reviewer
Jesse Brown
is a self-taught Salesforce architect,
evangelist, and fanboy based in
Indianapolis, Indiana. As of the
publication of this book, Jesse has 16
certifications in the Salesforce platform
and is eyeing the Certified Technical
Architect examination. Jesse works as
the Director of Solutions Architecture at
Provisio Partners.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer
Nature 2023
D. MacDonald, Impact Measurement and Outcomes Evaluation Using Salesforce for
Nonprofits
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9708-7_1

1. Introduction to Salesforce for

Nonprofits
Dustin MacDonald1
(1) Sigourney, IA, USA

This is a book about conducting impact measurement for nonprofits. If

you’re reading this book, I assume you work for a nonprofit or an
external evaluator or are a consultant like me and are interested in
using the power of Salesforce to improve your impact measurement
and evaluation. If so, this is the right book for you.
Combine the lack of reading material on subjects related to
Salesforce with the lack of resources for nonprofits using Salesforce,
and you have a recipe for numerous organizations to not take full
advantage of the technology that they’ve paid very good money for.
This book will help you supercharge your impact measurement and
outcome evaluation by developing an understanding of what it means
to have an impact and how to measure it. Then we’ll learn how to set
your Salesforce organization up so that you’re automatically collecting
the information that you need to be successful. And finally, we’ll explore
the technologies and techniques you have available to you to best
demonstrate the impact you’ve identified.
By tracing a straight line from your logic model or theory of change,
which shows you how the work you do with the people you serve,
through to the outputs and outcomes that your clients see, you can tell
a more compelling story. And we’ll finish by exploring how you can
leverage this newfound impact measurement skill to improve
fundraising and ensure your organization’s long-term success.
We’ll close with a set of case studies to demonstrate this process
based on several real-life nonprofits I have worked with, including a
telephone crisis line, a homeless shelter and associated food pantry,
and a Chamber of Commerce.
Salesforce as a platform has been around since 1997. It was created
by Marc Benioff with the original slogan – still used today – of “clicks,
not code.” The Internet was still relatively nascent in the 1990s, and
when you wanted most kinds of software, you needed to get them on a
CD or, worse, a mainframe. Computer software was big, bulky, hard to
use, and often slow to operate. In contrast, Salesforce made the promise
of a decentralized workforce something closer to reality by allowing
individuals to work from anywhere and allowing sales staff to work at a
new office just by visiting a new website.
That original version of Salesforce, called Salesforce Classic, is still
available (see Figure 1-1). Eventually, Salesforce transitioned to a new
layout and set of code called Lightning. While Salesforce Classic and
Lightning work on the same underlying database, Lightning
(sometimes also called Lightning Experience or LEX) is a total rewrite
of the Salesforce code that takes advantage of modern web standards
that, true to its name, often allow you to do things much quicker than
you used to.

Figure 1-1 Salesforce Classic

 Salesforce considers themselves a PaaS – a platform as a service.
You might hear this referred to sometimes as Software as a Service or
SaaS. This refers to an individual software that you can subscribe to,
like the Dropbox file storage service.
In contrast, Salesforce provides hundreds of services and
technologies inside their platform, like Flows, the Apex programming
language, and Experience Cloud Builder, to allow you to create your
own extensions to the out-of-the-box functionality.
Each Salesforce product exists as something called a Cloud. When
you first subscribe to Salesforce, you will be given access to one of these
Clouds. The very first Cloud was called, appropriately, Sales Cloud.
Sales Cloud allows you to do things like add sales leads into the
system; record phone calls, emails, and tasks against those leads;
convert those leads into Contacts when you’ve made sales to them;
track the Opportunity pipeline from start to end as you make sales; and
more. Sales Cloud also includes deal forecasting, which uses the past
data you’ve collected to understand the likelihood of a similar deal
closing and allows your sales staff to be as efficient as possible.
Over time, Salesforce added additional Clouds. Some of the most
popular include Service Cloud, Health Cloud, Experience Cloud, and
Nonprofit Cloud. Service Cloud, one of the earliest Clouds to be
launched after Sales Cloud, is designed for service-based organizations
or departments. If you are a manufacturer of air conditioners and you
use Sales Cloud for your sales staff to work with your suppliers and
distributors, your customer service staff can use Service Cloud to help
manage customer support.
Service Cloud includes functionality like ticket management via
email or through your website, internal and external knowledge bases
that can help provide articles and information, and an “OmniChannel”
that can allow your support staff to take phone calls, emails, text
messages, web-based chats, and more.
Service Console even features AI-powered chatbots using Einstein,
which is Salesforce’s name for their proprietary artificial
intelligence/machine learning technology. These chatbots can reply to
common customer issues, and only if it appears the customer’s needs
lie outside these frequent topics will the chatbot send the chat or text
over to a live agent. This all helps to make Salesforce as efficient a tool
as possible for support staff.
Health Cloud is another innovative Salesforce Cloud. Developed for
the unique needs of healthcare providers like doctor’s offices,
pharmacies, hospitals, and clinics, Health Cloud allows you to manage
the full spectrum of healthcare management including generating 835
and 837P medical billing files, integrating with Electronic Health
Record (EHR) systems, and a variety of workflow management tools
like Intelligent Form Reader which can read a scanned document and
convert it directly to a Salesforce record.
Finally, the Cloud that will be the focus of this book is Salesforce
Nonprofit Cloud. You might also hear this product referred to under the
umbrella of Salesforce for Nonprofits. This Cloud, like the Clouds
mentioned earlier, is made up of a variety of features. Unlike many
other Clouds, however, Salesforce for Nonprofits is broken into a few
groups of features that Salesforce calls packages. One of those packages
is the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). NPSP provides full spectrum
donation and grant management to replace or augment donation
management software like Raiser’s Edge.

Note We will leverage Nonprofit Cloud for the demonstrations and

examples in this book, but you don’t need to have Nonprofit Cloud to
take advantage of many of the items in this book. The principles and
techniques apply equally to all Clouds.

Another package under the Salesforce for Nonprofits umbrella is

Nonprofit Cloud Case Management or NCCM. Most of the time when
people talk about Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, this is the big package
they are talking about. NCCM provides nonprofits with all the standard
case management functionality they need including intakes, checklists,
assessments, case plans, and service delivery.
To further add confusion, NCCM is made up of the case management
components (sometimes called pure NCCM) and another package called
Program Management Module (PMM), as seen in Figure 1-2. PMM is
free and provides the ability to add programs and services into
Salesforce and track them as you provide support to clients. If you’re a
small nonprofit, you might use only NPSP and PMM and not need the
larger NCCM package.

Figure 1-2 Program Management Module

The final components of Salesforce for Nonprofits include tools like
Outbound Funds, a free add-on used for managing things like
administering grants or scholarships on behalf of other people, and
Accounting Subledger which is a paid add-on that produces ledger
entries for your nonprofit accounting system, shown in Figure 1-3.

Figure 1-3 AppExchange listing for the Outbound Funds product

Throughout this book, we’ll look at how you get NCCM/PMM or NPSPS
(as your situation dictates) and then how you can leverage these tools
for impact measurement. If you happen to use NPSP or another
Salesforce Cloud, all is not lost! Most of the things that we discuss are
Cloud-agnostic meaning you can learn from them and apply them into
your own Salesforce organization.
In addition to these common Clouds, Salesforce has numerous
Clouds that go beyond this including things like Auto Cloud for
automotive dealerships and GovCloud for federal government
customers who have specific compliance requirements. Each Cloud has
very specific features. By adding additional Clouds, you can also access
new features. For example, Net Zero Cloud includes features and
functions that help support organizational efforts to pursue net zero
carbon emissions and environmental sustainability.
To choose the right Cloud for you, you’ll need to consult your
Salesforce Account Executive (AE). Because Salesforce’s offerings
change all the time, you, and a neighbor who works in Salesforce, even
on the same Cloud, may have a different set of services depending on
which add-ons you selected.

Introduction to Nonprofit Cloud

This section reviews both Nonprofit Cloud Case Management and the
Program Management Module, two major components making up the
Nonprofit Cloud in Salesforce.

Nonprofit Cloud Case Management

Nonprofit Cloud Case Management or NCCM is the big behemoth in the
Salesforce nonprofit case management world. Before NCCM was
released, numerous solutions existed to provide this support.
Salesforce was even split into two parts: https://salesforce.com
was the corporate partner, which licensed the Salesforce platform to
business customers.
A separate California Benefit Corporation called Salesforce.org was
responsible for distributing discounted licenses to Salesforce for
nonprofits and educational organizations. In 2019, the two
organizations merged. Salesforce brought the nonprofit components
under the aegis of the “mothership” as it’s been called.
 That same year, Salesforce announced the release of NCCM and
Program Management Module (PMM). Until this date, people who
wanted to do case management in Salesforce needed to use the
Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP, discussed later) which had no case
management functionality and then extend it using a third-party tool
from the AppExchange (Salesforce’s answer to your phone’s app store).
Examples of those third-party tools include Birdseye by Provisio
Partners and Exponent Case Management by Exponent Partners.
With NCCM and PMM, nonprofits finally had a solution with the
weight of Salesforce behind it, and after the merger, nonprofit clients
were no longer considered second class citizens. NCCM has continued
to evolve, like all Salesforce products in active development, through
three-times a year release cycles. These release cycles allow the
company to build and trial new features and then release them to all
organizations all at once.
In its latest evolution, Salesforce has rolled out a new version called
NPC, or Nonprofit Cloud. For more information on NPC, see Chapter 10.
If you’ve never used NCCM before (or only scratched the surface in
your organization), you may be unfamiliar with all the options that it
provides.
Inbound Referrals: You can record inbound referrals to understand
where clients are coming from and what information you’ll need to
collect from them before they move to the next stage of working with
you.
Outbound Referrals: When you send a client to a community
partner, you can track where they went, which program they were
referred to, and the person they were referred to. You can also track
the status of the referral (was the person able to connect with the
agency) and the outcome of the referral (did they get what they
needed).
Intakes: Most nonprofits are familiar with the stack of papers that
comprise their organization’s intakes. An intake is sometimes your
first opportunity to collect data from your client and begin
understanding their unique needs. In Salesforce, intakes still exist
but NCCM Intakes lets you pull data from across your Salesforce
system into one page, so you can quickly access it. See Figure 1-4 for
an example of an intake.
Figure 1-4 A screenshot showing part of an intake
Intake Checklists: As part of your intake, you may have a set of
digital and paper processes for a client to complete. For example, the
client needs to provide you with a paystub or a copy of their ID in
addition to filling out some forms. With Intake Checklists, shown in
Figure 1-5, you can track these tasks right on the Intake and follow
them through to completion.
Figure 1-5 Example of an Intake Checklist
Case Plans, Goals, and Action Items: Case Plans are a staple of case
management work, allowing you to record the goals a client has and
their progress toward them. NCCM allows you to create multiple case
plans for each client, add goals to them, and then add action items to
each goal. You can see an example of a Case Plan in Figure 1-6.
Case Plans allow you to break down overwhelming goals like “get
a driver’s license” into achievable steps like “bring in your birth
certificate,” “read the driver’s manual,” and “study signage for the
written driving test.”
Figure 1-6 Building a Case Plan for a housing organization
Client Notes: Client Notes are another common case management
requirement. Salesforce supports client notes, which you can save as
drafts and submit them later, as well as tagging them so you can
quickly find important notes again.
Assessments: Assessments, shown in Figure 1-7, represent a
standardized way of collecting information about a client a
repeatable basis. Salesforce assessments can be scored, with the
results charted over time, compared, and aggregated. We will discuss
several examples of assessments later in this book.
Figure 1-7 Completing a housing assessment
Reporting and Analytics: Finally, Salesforce comes with robust
reporting capabilities. We’ll expand on the out-of-the-box reports
later in this book, but for now, know that Salesforce allows you to
slice, dice, and report whichever kind of data you need. An example
of a report is shown in Figure 1-8.

Figure 1-8 An example report

 You’ll notice in that list that there was nothing included about
programs or services. This was deliberate, because while NCCM is a
paid product, the Program Management Module (PMM) is not. PMM is a
free add-on to Salesforce that provides access to Programs and Services
functionality and is covered in the next section.

Program Management Module

Program Management Module (PMM) is automatically installed when
you install NCCM, if you don’t already have it. As a free add-on, however,
you can install PMM at any time in any org. PMM allows you to track
programs, as the name suggests, and services.
A program represents the service delivery you provide to clients.
For example, you might have a counseling program, a food bank
program, or a housing program. A service is the kind of support you
provide to meet the needs of that program.
Your counseling program might provide mental health counseling or
support group sessions as a service. A food bank provides food as a
service. And a housing program provides shelter beds. Salesforce lets
you set the type and quantity of each service delivery, so you could add
one hour of counseling, one group session, or one pound of food to a
client’s record. By putting clients into program cohorts, you can easily
group them, pull them up, email them, and report out on them.
Another major timesaver is a set of features that starts with Service
Schedules. A Service Schedule allows you to design a set of recurring
service deliveries like a class. You can schedule those and then RSVP
people for the individual sessions. Then with a click of a button, you can
collect attendance for dozens or even hundreds of people each session.
Service Sessions makes managing batch service deliveries a snap.

Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)

When people think of Salesforce and nonprofits, especially if they don’t
work in Salesforce, what often comes to mind is the Nonprofit Success
Pack. This is the result of the P10 (Power of Us) program that gives
eligible nonprofits ten free licenses to Salesforce with NPSP already
installed. This makes it an attractive choice for small or new nonprofits
who are dipping their toes into the waters of Salesforce. P10 is
discussed later in this chapter.
Although it’s free due to the generosity of Salesforce – who hope to
make up the revenue as you add additional licensed products and
services – NPSP is full-featured and very powerful. It expands and
transforms the Opportunity object used for recording information on
potential sales so that you can record all kinds of donations including
cash, pledges, matching gifts, and in-kind contributions.
Some of the major functionality in NPSP is detailed in the following
section.

Soft Credits
By leveraging the power of Soft Credits and Partial Soft Credits, you can
give credit where credit is due. If you receive a donation from person A,
but it was influenced by person B, you can ensure that person B is
counted in their donation totals by using Soft Credits. See a picture of
Soft Credits in Figure 1-9.

Figure 1-9 A Soft Credit from an influencer

Manage Households
The Nonprofit Success Pack allows you to work closely with your
donors, who can have situations as complex as the clients that you
serve. One of the ways that you can do this is through the Manage
Household functionality. If you have two contacts in Salesforce and they
move into the same household, you can merge the households together.
On the contrary, if a child moves out of their parent’s house and is going
to be donating or receiving services separately, you can split the new
household out from the existing one.
You can also configure settings like the default name of a household,
a formal greeting, an informal greeting, and some automation. When
you add a new contact into the system, NPSP will create the household
using the naming convention you have specified and create a formal
greeting with the salutation (e.g., Mr. or Dr.) and full name and an
informal greeting using the first name.

Engagement Plans
Like all good fundraising and development staff, you probably have a
plan for how to reach out to donors. You’ll use this plan to decide when
to reach out to new donors, who will reach out to them, and when. For
those who have donated in the past, engagement plans can help you
keep donors engaged and aware of your organization over time so that
you can retain and recapture donors. In development, this is called
moves management. In the development lifecycle (which can look like a
set of stages from Identification, Qualification, Cultivation, Solicitation,
and Stewardship), you’ll use engagement plan templates to coordinate
and repeat those tasks consistently.
Engagement plans begin life as engagement plan templates (Figure
1-10). Engagement plan templates are created and filled with tasks.
Those can be independent tasks that occur at any time and dependent
tasks that must be completed in a specific order. You can assign
someone to be responsible for each one and tick them off as they are
completed.
Figure 1-10 An engagement plan template

Gift Levels
Gift Levels in Nonprofit Cloud have a few uses. The first is to help you
manage your budgeting and your donation activity. For example, if you
run a small nonprofit that needs to generate $200,000 a year to
operate, you might set up gift levels of
Gold ($25,000 or more)
Silver ($10,000 or more)
Bronze ($5,000)
Supporter (under $5,000)
If you know that you have two gold level donors, five silver level
donors, and ten bronze level donors, you’ll know you have brought in
$100,000. From your supporters and the wider community, you will
need to raise the other $100,000 that your organization needs to
operate.
In Nonprofit Success Pack, gift levels will help you track the
contribution level of each donor, so you can keep track of their
contributions. You can also connect this with automation so that as
someone approaches a certain level, such as a Founder’s Circle, you
proactively reach out to them to encourage them to make that last
contribution to push them into the next contribution level and continue
to support your organization.
Gift Entry Templates
Nonprofit Success Pack allows you to record all your donations, or gifts
as they come in. Because of the unique data that you need to capture for
different kinds of donations and different ways of entering those
donations, Gift Entry Templates allow you to set up processes that
match your preferred workflows.
For example, when adding credit card donations, you might be
interested in recording whether those donations are recurring or one-
time. If you’re adding a batch of donations, you might want a more
streamlined data entry process than when you’re entering donations
once at a time. Gift Entry Templates allow you to handle these different
situations to make your donation process the most effective it can be.

Recurring Donations
As a nonprofit, your most loyal supporters are often recurring donors.
Whether they give monthly, yearly, or some other frequency, you know
when to expect their funds to arrive. This is especially true if they make
a pledge and then begin making donations to support the pledge.
Nonprofit Success Pack allows you to handle these recurring
donations with ease. You can enter open-ended recurring donations for
those donors that have set up a recurring donation schedule or a fixed-
length schedule for situations where a person or an organization has
committed a specific amount of money that will be disbursed on a
regular schedule.

Rollup Summaries
Rollup summaries (often simply called rollups) are one of the most
powerful parts of Salesforce. Many users of Salesforce are familiar with
rollups from their experience with Master-Detail objects. In a Master-
Detail object, one of the objects is the parent and one is the child. By
defining a Rollup Summary on the Master object, you can capture the
Sum, Count, Minimum, or Maximum of the child records.
For example, if you use Cases to track your inbound and outbound
referrals, you might have a Custom Object called Referral Resolution
Details that you use for each person who works on that Case to provide
information such as the length of time each staff member spends
working on the referral by filling out a number field called
Duration_of_Work__c with the number of minutes.
If you wanted to know the total number of minutes that all the staff
members had spent, you could use a rollup summary to do so. To do
this, you would create a field on the parent object, Case, called
Total_Minutes_Spent__c, with the field type Rollup Summary and the
type set to Sum and the rollup field set to the Duration_of_Work__c field
on the Referral Resolution object. Then, for each Case, you would see
the sum of the minutes spent from the related Referral Resolution
records. Fantastic!
Rollups are great and very powerful. Unfortunately, they have some
major limitations. The biggest is that you can only create rollup
summary fields on master-detail objects. There is a soft limit of 25
rollup summary fields that can only be raised to a maximum of 40 by
Salesforce. While you can have several options for how to summarize
(noted earlier), average is not among them.
The Customizable Rollups functionality of Nonprofit Success Pack
avoids all these limitations by allowing you to create a variety of rollups
including new rollup methods like Average, Distinct (unique values),
and Donor Streak which are used to determine the number of years in a
row someone has donated.

Reporting and Analytics

Reporting and analytics are some of the most important elements of
adopting a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system like
Salesforce. By storing all your data in Salesforce and using it as a single
source of truth, you unlock the ability to do advanced reporting to
funders, creating and viewing oversight dashboards and more.
Although each component of Salesforce for Nonprofits comes with
some pre-created reports and dashboards, learning how to extend this
functionality throughout this book will allow you to have confidence
that you are doing the right work and demonstrating that to others.

Outbound Funds Module

Outbound Funds Module (OFM) is a newer part of Salesforce for
Nonprofits. Started in 2017 and released in 2018 by members of the
Salesforce.org community as a free and open source product, it was
eventually absorbed by Salesforce in 2020.
OFM remains as a free optional add-on today. It allows you to create
funding programs to represent scholarships or other kinds of outbound
benefits where funds are being paid directly to constituents. From
there, an individual can submit a Funding Request. Finally, you can
track requirements such as documents needed, progress reports
required, or other steps to manage the funding process.
Finally, the Disbursement object lets you manage the actual
payment.

Accounting Subledger
Accounting Subledger allows Salesforce and your accounting system
(e.g., Sage or QuickBooks) to talk to each other. When you use
Accounting Subledger, the system generates accounting records as
standard journal entries. You can use cash or accrual accounting and
reconcile accounting periods inside Salesforce in the same way that you
do with your accounting system. When you’re ready, you can export
those ledger entries for import into that external system.
By having matching data in your accounting system and Salesforce,
you can take advantage of the power of both systems to be more
efficient and have a more unified view of your operations. An example
of an Accounting Subledger report is found in Figure 1-11.
Figure 1-11 An Accounting Subledger report

Other Salesforce Tools

Salesforce includes other packages from Salesforce Labs, which allows
Salesforce employees to build and share AppExchange tools with the
wider Salesforce community. Examples of apps from Salesforce Labs
include Project Management Tool (PMT), which as the name suggests
allows you to manage projects, and Salesforce Field Service Starter Kit
which extends Salesforce’s Field Service product with new Flows and
dashboards. Other Salesforce Labs solutions are covered in Chapter 9.

Getting Started with Salesforce

If you’ve never worked with Salesforce before, this section will help. If
you have, you can safely skip this section. If you find yourself interested
in adopting Salesforce, the first step is to reach out to Salesforce. You
can use the Contact Us page on https://salesforce.com, or if you
know an existing nonprofit using Salesforce, you can ask for the contact
information of their Account Executive or AE.
Either way, once you’ve established contact with Salesforce, you’ll
be reached out to by a presales professional who will guide you through
the process of signing up for Salesforce. They will create a trial version
of Salesforce (also called a trial org) that will be converted to your final
version of Salesforce once you finish signing up.

Understanding the Power of Us (P10) Program

For many nonprofits, the Power of Us program, also called P10 for
short, is the reason they can afford Salesforce in the first place. This
program provides ten free Salesforce licenses to eligible nonprofits. In
addition to these free licenses, nonprofits also receive discounts on
Salesforce training and events, access to nonprofit user groups to meet
like-minded individuals and organizations, and other benefits. The P10
application is shown in Figure 1-12.

Figure 1-12 Salesforce’s P10 application page

You’ll need to provide some information to Salesforce to support

your eligibility. Although the exact eligibility criteria can be adjusted in
the future, at the time of printing, the requirements include being an
officially recognized “charitable, nonprofit, educational, or social
change organization.”
You can establish this by pursuing recognition as a tax-exempt
organization with 501(c)(3) status as recognized by the Internal
Revenue Service (IRS) in the United States or registered charity status
with the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) in Canada.
You can learn more about the Power of Us eligibility requirements
at www.salesforce.org/power-of-us/eligibility-
guidelines/.

Signing Your Contract

Before you sign your contract, you’ll need to meet some specific
requirements from Salesforce. These include having an identified
System Administrator and authorization from the Executive Director or
Board Chair providing approval to sign up for Salesforce. You’ll also
need to provide proof of your nonprofit status and any other
documentation Salesforce needs for your specific situation.
After some back and forth with your salesperson and Account
Executive, you’ll sign a contract and be provided access to your
organization. Salesforce contracts are often for three or five years to
give you the length of time you need to get set up and established.

Getting Access to Your Organization

Once your contract is signed and fully executed, Salesforce sends you
the credentials to your organization. These will come in the form of an
initial System Administrator account you can use to get into Salesforce.
You’ll use that to create your other users and do anything else you need
to do, like installing Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), Nonprofit Cloud
Case Management (NCCM), Program Management Module (PMM), or
any of the other tools you’ll use.

Installing Other Salesforce Tools

When you first get into your Salesforce instance, you’ll have the licenses
that you’ve purchased or been given in the P10 program. Licenses are
only half of the equation. You also need to install the specific apps,
features, or functionality that you need.
There are two ways you can do this. The first is using the Salesforce
AppExchange. The AppExchange is a marketplace which you can access,
even while not logged in to Salesforce, at
https://appexchange.salesforce.com/. There, you can
search through apps developed by Salesforce and third parties,
consultants, and lots of other information.
The other way is to use a special Salesforce tool called MetaDeploy.
MetaDeploy is used to install specific collections of code (called
packages). Salesforce distributes some packages themselves, and some
organizations install code using MetaDeploy.
You can access this using
https://install.salesforce.org/.
Some of the more than two dozen tools included on MetaDeploy are
as follows:
Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)
Volunteers for Salesforce (V4S)
Project Management Module (PMM)
Outbound Funds Module (OFM)
Nonprofit Cloud Case Management (NCCM)

Conclusion
If you’ve been following along, you should now have learned a little bit
more about Salesforce and the Nonprofit Cloud. If you don’t have a
Salesforce org yet, you have to sign up for one. Once you’ve been
approved for the P10 program and signed your contract, you’ve been
issued your org with your licenses. Finally, after installing the products
you’ve signed up for, you are ready for the next steps.
In our next chapter, we will review the fundamentals of impact
measurement and outcomes evaluation to provide you with the
foundation you need to be prepared as you work through the rest of the
material.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer
Nature 2023
D. MacDonald, Impact Measurement and Outcomes Evaluation Using Salesforce for
Nonprofits
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9708-7_2

2. Introduction to Impact Measurement

and Outcome Evaluation
Dustin MacDonald1
(1) Sigourney, IA, USA

Before we can dive too deep into the practice of impact measurement
and outcome evaluation, we need to understand what these things are.
We’ll start with a review of common definitions, like impact,
measurement, outcomes, and evaluation. After that, we’ll go into the
specifics of each framework that we will be using through the rest of
the book with examples. Even if you are someone who has used these
frameworks before, it will be valuable to read this chapter, so we have
some common definitions to work from as we proceed.
This chapter presents a high-level overview of the theory and
practice of impact measurement and outcome evaluation. This is a
primer for those who may be new to this role or a review for those who
may be experienced practitioners but have been away from the theory.
We will also review common impact measurement and outcome
frameworks to help you decide which one makes sense for your specific
situation. We review Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Objectives
and Key Results (OKRs). We also look at a traditional fundraising model
of return on investment (ROI) and cost-benefit analysis (CBA).

Common Definitions
The first step to overhauling your organization’s impact measurement
and outcome evaluation is to understand what those things are. Impact
is the effect that your organization’s services or benefits have on the
people that you serve. If you are a food pantry, your impact is the food
that you provide. If you’re a counseling organization, your impact is the
counseling sessions that you deliver to community members.
Impact is the first link in a chain that leads to positive social change
or difference. If you drop a pebble in the water, that pebble is the
impact that you are having on the water.
The next link in this change is the outputs. These are the immediate
effects that your impact has on the individuals that you serve. In our
food pantry example, we provided food to individuals (impact) which
caused a reduction in their hunger (output.)
For the counseling agency, the output of their counseling sessions
may be a reduced feeling of anxiety or distress or an increased feeling
of belonging in the immediate aftermath of the counseling session.
Outputs are the first ripples in the water created by the dropped pebble
in the water.
Output is often confused with outcome, but these are different, and
the distinction is important, especially when we look at frameworks
that rely on that difference like social return on investment.
The final link in the chain is outcomes. These are the final results or
long-term effects of the benefits provided to clients. One way to think
about the distinction between outputs and outcomes is to imagine a
medical treatment. After surgery, you might be prescribed a painkiller
by your doctor. Being prescribed the painkiller is one impact of the
physician. Taking the painkiller and having an immediate reduction in
your pain is the output.
The reduction in the pain is the part that we can measure and
observe: your pain level went from an 8 to a 2. You are feeling much
better. The outcome of that pain reduction is that you are now able to
participate in activities that you never could before.
Even though participating in those activities is distinct from surgery
and painkillers, it is effectively the result of them. This is one of the
most important concepts in impact measurement and outcome
evaluation. By carefully considering your outputs and how they
influence outcomes, you can develop a deeper understanding of your
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Whitechapel at all, because it was not there. It had vanished
overnight.
He was kneeling on short grass, and the crevice in the earth from
which he had crept lay towards one end of a shallow depression,
enclosed by low grassy banks. A young poplar in the middle of it
moved its leaves delicately in the faint wind. All round were
meadows of irregular and broken surface, with a few sheep grazing
in them, and here and there patches of bramble and wild thorn.
Farther off Jeremy could distinguish small groves of trees and the
dark outlines of low houses or sheds. Farther off still he saw, black
and jagged against the rising sun, something that resembled the
tumbled ruins of a great public building. He turned giddy and could
not rise from his knees. His muscles refused their service, though it
seemed that he strained at them with all his strength, until his
stomach revolted and he was seized with a dreadful nausea, which
shook him physically and brought a sick taste into his mouth. He
found himself looking down at his grave as though he wanted to
crawl back into it; and then suddenly an inexplicable horror and
despair overcame him, and he flung himself face downwards in the
dew-laden grass.

2
What were Jeremy’s thoughts while he lay face down in the grass he
could not himself have told. They were not articulate, consecutive
thoughts. The landscape that he had seen on emerging from his
grave had pressed him back into the shapeless abysms that lie
behind reason and language. But, when the fit had passed, when he
raised his head again, and saw that nothing had changed, that he
was indeed in this unfamiliar country, he would have given a world to
be able to accept the evidence of his eyes without incurring an
immediate self-accusation of folly.
The transition from the image in his mind to the image which his
eyes gave him had been so violent and so abrupt that it had
wrenched up all his ordinary means of thought, and set his mind
wildly adrift. During a moment he would not have been surprised to
hear the Last Trump, to see the visible world go up in flame, and the
Court of Judgment assembled in the sky. He told himself that the
next instant MacIan and Trehanoc might step from behind the
nearest clump of thorn and greet him. But the new landscape
continued stable and definite, as unlike the scene of an Apocalypse
as the creation of a dream. Could this then be an hallucination of
unusual completeness? And, if so, had those dreadful hours during
which he had struggled in his tomb been also the result of an
hallucination? He stooped absent-mindedly to the low grassy bank
by which he was standing and plucked a confidently promenading
snail from a plantain leaf. The creature hastily drew in its horns and
retracted its body within the shell. Was that, too, delusion?
And yet, the day before, he had been in Trehanoc’s warehouse in
Lime Court in Whitechapel, there had been that sudden violence,
and, as he still clearly remembered, he had crawled under the
laboratory table before the cellar-roof had fallen on him. While he
had struggled through the night to free himself, a picture of the place
had been perfectly distinct in his mind. On emerging he had turned
without reflection to where he knew the door of the cellar stood. The
table which had saved him had been at one end of the cellar, parallel
to the shorter wall. Jeremy went back to his crevice and stood beside
it. It lay in a depression which was roughly four-sided, and it was
parallel to the shorter pair of sides. Jeremy bit his lips and looked
about him vaguely. Over there should have been the cellar steps,
and, going up them, one came to the front door ... just over there ...
and beyond the front door there had been the flags of Lime Court.
Jeremy followed this imaginary path with the absorbed care and
exactitude which were his means of keeping in touch with reason.
Where the flag-stones should have been there was now soft turf,
dotted here and there with the droppings of sheep. And suddenly
Jeremy saw a patch where something had rubbed away the turf and
stone protruded....
He stood above it, legs wide apart, teeth clenched, and hands
gripped. He felt like a man whom a torrent carries down a dark cleft
towards something he dares not conjecture. But when this fit, too,
had passed away he felt nothing more acutely than the desire to be
able to believe. Presently, as he stood and wrestled with himself, his
scientific training and cast of mind came to his help. It was legitimate
to form a hypothesis, provided that it accounted for all the facts and
made no more assumptions than were necessary in order to do so.
Illuminated by this thought, he took a few steps back to his crevice,
sat down, grasped his jaw firmly between his hands, and began to
enquire what hypothesis would be most suitable. That of an
hallucination he immediately dismissed. It might be the true
explanation; but as a working basis it led nowhere and required no
thought. If he was living amid illusory shows the country round him
might change at any moment to a desert or an ice-floe ... or he might
find himself pursued by snakes with three heads.
Well.... The alternative theory assumed that the spot on which he
now sat was the same which had formerly been occupied by
Trehanoc’s warehouse. His observations underground prior to his
delivery, the shape of the depression, and the flag-stone where Lime
Court should have been, all supported this assumption. In that case
it followed irrefragably that he could not have been knocked on the
head on the previous day. He must have been in that grave, covered
by the table, and the rubble, and the turf for a considerable time. It
therefore remained only to estimate a period sufficient for the
changes he now observed to have taken place.
It was perhaps just as well that Jeremy had steadied his mind by
exercising it in a mode of thought to which it was accustomed: for
when he reached this point and looked round enquiringly at the
material evidence his head began to whirl again. There was, in
particular, a young poplar, about ten or twelve feet high, standing in
the middle of the hollow.... Jeremy rose, went to it, and slapped the
hole reflectively. It was still young enough to reply by a more agitated
rustling of its leaves. Here was the problem compactly put. What was
the shortest possible time in which the tree could have attained this
growth?
If Jeremy knew that he would also indisputably know the shortest
possible time he could have been underground. It was true that his
estimate might still be too small by many years. He suspected that
most of the much taller trees he could see round him at a greater
distance must have been sown since the change; but still with the
poplar he would have reached a firm minimum basis. Unfortunately,
Jeremy did not know the answer to the question. He was not a
botanist, but a physicist, and if he had ever known the rate at which
a poplar grows, he had forgotten it. It could hardly be less than ten or
fifteen years.... But if it was fifteen, what then? And if he could have
lain entombed for fifteen years, why not for fifty? why not for five
hundred? And the turf? How long would it be before the ruins of a
house were covered with thick turf? That could hardly happen in
fifteen years, even if the ruins were left quite undisturbed.... And why
had it been left undisturbed in what used to be a busy quarter of
London? (The questions thronged now, innumerable and
irrepressible.) What had been going on while he had been
underground? Were any living men still left? As he asked the last
question it was answered. In the distance a couple of figures walked
leisurely across the meadows to one of the sheds which Jeremy had
vaguely descried, fumbled with the door and went in. They were far
too far off for Jeremy to see what manner of men they were; but
were they never so gentle, never so kindly, he feared them. He
crouched lower down by the entrance to his crevice, and for the
second time that morning had half a mind to get back into it, as
though it were a magic car that could transport him whence he had
come.
The sun rose higher and began to grow hot, and the dew dried
swiftly off the grass and the leaves. Very strangely sleep descended
on Jeremy, not violently as before, but soft and unnoticed, as though
some superior power, seeing his mind reach the limits of conjecture,
had gently thrown it out of action. Before he even knew that he was
drowsy he had collapsed on the soft turf, his head on the little mound
which hid his tabletop, and there he slept for two or three hours,
careless and defenseless in a novel and possibly hostile world.
When he woke he found that in sleep his main perplexity had been
resolved. He now believed without difficulty that he had been carried
in a trance out of his own time, how far he did not know, and the
admission of the fact gave him a curious tranquillity and courage to
face whatever the consequences might be. It did not, however, alter
the ineluctable truth that he was very hungry, and this truth made it
plain to him that he must take up the business of living, and run even
the risk of meeting the strange people from whom he instinctively
shrank. He therefore stood up with a gesture of resolution, and
determined to discover, if he could, the trace of Whitechapel High
Street, and to follow it in the direction of what had once been
London. He remembered having spent a toilsome morning in the
South Downs following the track of an old Roman road, and he
judged that this ought not to be much more difficult. He had a
strange repugnance to throwing himself on the charity of the
inhabitants of the new Whitechapel, and an equally strange desire to
reach the ruins of Holborn, which had once been his home.
When he had made this resolution he went again into the ghost of
Lime Court, took three steps down it, and turned to the left into what
he hoped would be the side street leading to the main road. His shot
was a lucky one. Banks of grass here and there, mounds crested
with bramble, and at one point a heap of moldering brickwork,
pointed out his road, and there was actually a little ribbon of a foot-
path running down the middle of it. Jeremy moved on slowly, feeling
unpleasantly alone in the wide silent morning, and watching carefully
for a sign of the great street along which the trams used to run.
The end of the path which he was following was marked by a grove
of young trees, surrounded by bushes; and beyond this, Jeremy
conjectured, he would most likely find the traces of what he sought.
He approached this point cautiously, and when the path dipped down
into the grove he slipped along it as noiselessly as he could. When it
emerged again he started back with a suppressed cry. Whitechapel
High Street was not hard to find, for it was still in being. Here, cutting
the path at right angles, was a road—one of the worst he had ever
seen, but a road nevertheless. He walked out into the middle of it,
stared right and left, and was satisfied. Its curve was such that with
the smallest effort he could restore it in his mind to what it had been.
On the side from which he came the banks and irregularities, which
were all that was left of the houses, stretched brokenly out of sight.
On the other side the rubble seemed for the most part to have been
cleared, and some of it had been used to make a low continuous
fence, which was now grass-grown, though ends of brick and stone
pushed out of the green here and there. Beyond it cows were
grazing, and the ground fell gently down to a belt of woods, which
shut off the view.
Jeremy turned his attention again to the road itself. To a man who
recollected the roads round Ypres and on the Somme, it had no new
horrors to offer, but to a man who had put these memories behind
him and who had, for all practical purposes, walked only yesterday
through the streets of London, it was a surprising sight. Water lay on
it in pools, though the soil at its side was comparatively dry. The ruts
were six or seven inches deep and made a network over the whole
surface, which, between them, was covered with grass and weeds.
Immediately in front of Jeremy there was a small pit deeper than the
ruts, and filled at the bottom with loose stones. It was below the
worst of farm tracks, but it was too wide for that, and besides,
Jeremy could not rid his vision of the great ghostly trams that flitted
through it.
But, bad as it was, it meant life, and even apparently a degree of
civilization. And Jeremy felt again an unconquerable aversion from
presenting himself to the strange people who had inherited the earth
of his other life. A road, to a man who comes suddenly on it out of
open country, is always mutely and strangely a witness of the
presence of other men. This unspeakable track, more than the path
down which he had just walked, more even than the figures he had
seen in the distance, filled him with a dread of the explanations he
would have to make to the first chance comer he met. His
appearance would no doubt be suspicious to them, and his story
would be more suspicious still. Either they would not have the
intelligence to understand it or, understanding, would not credit it.
Jeremy tried to imagine his own feelings supposing that he had met,
say, somewhere on the slopes of Leith Hill, a person in archaic
costume who affirmed that he had been buried for a century or so
and desired assistance. Jeremy could think of no method by which
his tale could be made to sound more probable. He therefore,
making excuses to himself, shrank back into the grove, and took
shelter behind a bush, in the hope, as he put it, of thinking of some
likely mendacity to serve instead of the truth. When he was settled
there he broke off a young trailer of the hedge rose, peeled it, and
ate it. It was neither satisfying nor nourishing, but it had been one of
the inexpensive delights of his childhood, and it was something.
He was just consuming this dainty when a curious rattling and
clanking round the curve of the road struck his ear. It rapidly
approached, and he started forward to get a view through the leaves
of his bush. To his astonishment he saw a young man propelling a
bicycle of uncouth appearance, which leapt uncontrollably on the
broken road, and threatened to throw its rider at every yard of
progress. He peered at it as closely as he could, and had just
decided that its odd look came from an unwieldy frame and most
unusual tires when, after a last alarming stagger, its front wheel shot
into a rut and its rider was deposited within a yard or two of Jeremy’s
feet.
Jeremy had then an opportunity of inspecting both at his leisure, and
hardly knew which ought to engage his attention first. The machine
was sufficiently remarkable, and reminded him of nothing so much
as of some which he had seen in the occupied territories of Germany
at the end of the war. Its frame was exceedingly heavy, as were all
the working parts which could be seen; and it was covered, not with
enamel, but with a sort of coarse paint. The spokes of the wheels
were half the size of a man’s little finger, and the rims were of thick
wood, with springs in the place of tires. The rider, when he had
wearily picked himself up and dusted his garments just under
Jeremy’s staring eyes, was by no means so unexpected. The dress,
from which he was still brushing the dust with reluctant fingers,
consisted of a short brown coat like a blazer, brown breeches, and
leather leggings, and on his head he wore a wide-brimmed brown
soft hat. His shirt was open at the throat, but below the opening hung
a loose and voluminous tie of green linen. His face, on which sat a
plainly unwonted expression of annoyance, was mild, candid, and
friendly. His voice, when he spoke, was soft and pleasant, and his
accent had a strange rich burr in it, which vaguely reminded Jeremy
of something he had heard before and could not quite name ...
something, it seemed, almost grotesque in this connection....
“I never,” said the young man, solemnly but without rancor, to the
inattentive universe, “I never will mount one of those devices again.”

3
Jeremy had ample time to be certain of these details while the young
man stood as it were for inspection. When he had dusted himself
thoroughly and had looked three or four times round him and up into
the sky, apparently to make sure that no celestial chariot was coming
to rescue him, he dragged the bicycle from the middle of the road
and began to examine it. First of all he tried to wheel it a pace or two,
and when it refused to advance he discovered with a gesture of
surprise that the chain was off. He slowly lowered the whole machine
on to the grass by the roadside and squatted down to adjust the
chain. After several fruitless attempts a renewed expression of
annoyance crossed his tranquil features, and he sat back on his
heels with a sigh.
Jeremy could bear it no longer. Dearer to him even than his
European reputation for research into the Viscosity of Liquids was
the reputation he had among his friends as a useful man for small
mechanical jobs. He would soon have to introduce himself to one or
another of what he vaguely supposed to be his descendants. This
young man had an unusually calm and friendly appearance, and it
was not unlikely that Jeremy might be able to help him in his trouble.
He therefore came out of his hiding-place, saying brusquely. “Let me
see if I can do anything.”
The young man did not start up in fear or even speak. He merely
looked slightly surprised and yielded the bicycle without protest into
Jeremy’s hands. Jeremy turned it over and peered into it with the
silent absorbed competence of a mechanic. Presently he looked up
and made a brief demand for a spanner. The young man, still mutely,
replied with a restrained but negative movement of his hands.
Jeremy, frowning, ran through his own pockets, and produced a
metal fountain pen holder, with which in a moment he levered the
incredibly clumsy chain back into place. Then he raised the machine
and wheeled it a few yards, showing the chain in perfect action. But
the front wheel perceptibly limped. Jeremy dropped on one knee and
looked at it with an acute eye.
“No good,” he pronounced at last, “it’s buckled. You won’t be able to
ride it, but at least you can wheel it.” And he solemnly handed the
machine back to its owner.
“Thank you very much,” said the young man gently. Jeremy could
still hear that odd, pleasant burr in his voice. And then he enquired
with a little hesitation, “Are you a blacksmith?”
“Good Heavens, no!” Jeremy cried. “Why——”
The young man appeared to choose his words carefully. “I’m sorry.
You see, you know all about the bicycle, and ... and ... I couldn’t
quite see what your clothes were....” He slurred over the last remark,
perhaps feeling it to be ill-mannered, and went on hastily: “I asked
because in the village I’ve come from, just a couple of miles down
the road, the blacksmith is dead and....” He paused and looked at
Jeremy expectantly.
Jeremy on his side realized that the moment had come when he
must either tell his amazing story or deliberately shirk it. But while he
had been bending over the bicycle a likely substitute had occurred to
him, a substitute which, however, he would have hesitated to offer to
any one less intelligent and kindly in appearance than his new
acquaintance. He hesitated a moment, and decided on shirking, or,
as he excused it to himself, on feeling his way slowly.
“I don’t know,” he said with an accent of dull despair. “I don’t know
who or what I am. I think I must have lost my memory.”
The young man gave a sympathetic exclamation. “Lost your
memory?” he cried. “Then,” he went on, his face brightening,
“perhaps you are a blacksmith. I can tell you they want one very
badly over there....” But he caught himself up, and added, “Perhaps
not. I suppose you can’t tell what you might have been.” He ceased,
and regarded Jeremy with benevolent interest.
“I can’t,” Jeremy said earnestly. “I don’t know where I came from, or
what I am, or where I am. I don’t even know what year this is. I can
remember nothing.”
“That’s bad,” the young man commented with maddening
deliberation. “I can tell you where you are, at any rate. This is called
Whitechapel Meadows—just outside London, you know. Does that
suggest anything to you?”
“Nothing ... nothing ... I woke up just over there”—he swung his arm
vaguely in the direction of the ruins of the warehouse—“and that’s all
I know.” He suppressed an urgent desire to emphasize again his
ignorance of what year it was. Something told him that a man who
had just lost his memory would be concerned with more immediate
problems.
“Well,” said the young man pleasantly at last, “do you think you came
from London? If you do, you’d better let me take you there and see
you safe in one of the monastery hospitals or something of that sort.
Then perhaps your family would find you.”
“I think so.” Jeremy was uncertain whether this would be a step in
the right direction. “I seem to remember.... I don’t know....” He
paused, feeling that he could not have imagined a situation so
difficult. He had read a number of books in which men had been
projected from their own times into the future, but, by one lucky
chance or another, none of them had any trouble in establishing
himself as the immediate center of interest. Yet he supposed it would
be more natural for such an adventurer to be treated as he was
going to be treated—that is to say as a mental case. It would be
tragically absurd if he in his unique position were to be immured in a
madhouse, regarded as a man possessed by incurable delusions,
when he might be deriving some consolation for his extraordinary
fate in seeing how the world had changed, in seeing, among other
things, what was the current theory of the Viscosity of Liquids, and
whether his own name was remembered among the early
investigators into that fascinating question.
While he still hesitated his companion went on in a soothing tone,
“That will be much the best way. Come with me if you think you’re
well enough to walk.”
“Oh, yes ... yes ...” distractedly. And as a matter of fact, his hunger
and his increasing bewilderment aside, Jeremy had never felt so well
or so strong in his life before. He was even a little afraid that the
activity of his manner might belie the supposed derangement of his
mind. He therefore attempted to assume a somewhat depressed
demeanor as he followed his new friend along the road.
The young man was evidently either by nature not loquacious, or
else convinced that it would be unwise to excite Jeremy by much
conversation—perhaps both. As they went along he gave most of his
attention to the conduct of his bicycle, and only threw over his
shoulder now and again a kindly “Do you remember that?” or “Does
that remind you of anything?” as they passed what would apparently
be landmarks familiar to any Londoner in the habit of using that road.
But all were equally strange to Jeremy, and he gazed round him
keenly to guess if he could what sort of people they were among
whom he had fallen. Clearly, if he were to judge by the man who was
walking at his side, they were not barbarians; and yet everywhere
the countryside showed evidence of decay, which totally defeated all
the expectations of the prophets of his own time. As they drew closer
to London, which was still hidden from them by belts of trees, the
broken meadows of Whitechapel gave place to cleared plots of
garden, and here and there among them stood rude hovels, huts that
no decent district council would have allowed to be erected. Jeremy,
gazing at them as closely as he could without exciting the attention
of his guide, thought that many of them seemed to have been built
by piling roughly together fragments of other buildings. Presently a
gang of laborers going out to the fields passed them, saluting
Jeremy with a curious stare, and his companion, when they were
able to transfer their gaze to him, with touched caps, whether
because they knew him or merely out of respect for his appearance
Jeremy could not decide. But it was surprising how familiar their look
was. They were what Jeremy had encountered many hundreds of
times in country lanes and the bars of country inns; and it was only
vaguely and as it were with the back of his consciousness that he
perceived their ruder dress and the greater respectfulness of their
manner.
The transition from the fields to the town was abrupt. They reached
and passed a little wood which bordered both sides of the road, and
immediately beyond it the first street began. The houses were almost
all of Jeremy’s own day or before it, but though they were inhabited
they were heavy with age, sagging and hanging in different
directions in a manner which betokened long neglect. At the end of
the street a knot of loiterers stood. Behind them the street was busy
with foot passengers, and Jeremy stared along it to a tangle of
houses, some old and some new, but nearly all wearing the same
strange air of instability and imminent collapse. Their appearance
affected him, as one is affected when one wakes in an unfamiliar
room, sleepily expecting to see accustomed things and grows dizzy
in substituting the real picture for the imagined. He caught his breath
and paused.
“What’s the matter?” asked the young man, instantly solicitous.
“Nothing,” Jeremy replied, “only feel faint ... must rest a minute.” He
leant against a mass of ruined and lichened brickwork, breathing
shortly and jerkily.
“Here,” cried his companion, dropping the bicycle, “sit down till you
feel better.” And, exerting an unsuspected strength, he took Jeremy
bodily in his arms and lowered him gently till he reclined on the
grass. Jeremy looked up, grateful for his kindness, which was
reassuring, though he knew that it did not spring from sympathy with
his real perplexities. But he immediately dropped his eyes and
clenched his hands while he strove to master his doubts. Would it
not perhaps be the wiser plan to confess his position to this young
man and take the risk of being thought a madman? And a moment’s
reflection convinced him that he would never have a better
opportunity. The face that now leant anxiously above him was not
perhaps so alert or active in appearance as he could have wished;
but it was extraordinarily friendly and trustworthy. If the young man
could be made to believe in Jeremy’s story, he would do all that was
possible to help him. Jeremy made his decision with a leap, and
looking up again said thickly:
“I say.... I didn’t tell you the truth just now.”
“What? Don’t talk. You’ll feel better in a moment.”
“No, I must,” Jeremy insisted. “I’m all right; I haven’t lost my memory.
I wish to God I had lost it.”
The young man showed for the first time serious symptoms of
surprise and alarm. “What,” he began, “are you a—”
Jeremy silenced him with an imperative wave of the hand. “Let me
go on,” he said feverishly, “you mustn’t interrupt me. It’s difficult
enough to say, anyway. Listen.”
Then, brokenly, he told his story in a passion of eagerness to be as
brief as he could, and at the same time to make it credible by the
mere force of his will. When he began to speak he was looking at the
ground, but as he reached the crucial points he glanced up to see
the listener’s expression, and he ended with his gaze fixed directly,
appealingly, on the young man’s eyes. But the first words in
response made him break into a fit of hysterical laughter.
“Good heavens!” the young man cried in accents of obvious relief.
“Do you know what I was thinking? Why, I more than half thought
you were going to say that you were a criminal or a runaway!”
Jeremy pulled himself together with a jerk, and asked breathlessly,
“What year is this? For God’s sake tell me what year it is!”
“The year of Our Lord two thousand and seventy-four,” the young
man answered, and then suddenly realizing the significance of what
he had said, he put his hand on Jeremy’s shoulder, and added: “All
right, man, all right. Be calm.”
“I’m all right,” Jeremy muttered, putting his hands on the ground to
steady himself, “only it’s rather a shock—to hear it—” For, strangely,
though he had admitted in his thoughts the possibility of even greater
periods than this, the concrete naming of the figures struck him
harder than anything that day since the moment in which he had
expected to see houses and had seen only empty meadows. Now
when he closed his eyes his mind at once sank in a whirlpool of
vague but powerful emotions. In this darkness he perceived that he
had been washed up by fate on a foreign shore, more than a century
and a half out of his own generation, in a world of which he was
ignorant, and which had no place for him, that his friends were all
long dead and forgotten.... When his mind emerged from this
eclipse, he found that his cheeks were wet with tears and that he
was laughing feebly. All the strength and activity were gone out of
him; and he gazed up at his companion helplessly, feeling as
dependent on him as a young child on its parent.
“What shall we do now?” he asked in a toneless voice.
But the young man was turning his bicycle around again. “If you feel
well enough,” he answered gently, “I want you to come back and
show me the place where you were hidden. You know ... I don’t
doubt you. I honestly don’t; but it’s a strange story, and perhaps it
would be better for you if I were to look at the place before any one
disturbs it. So, if you’re well enough...?” Jeremy nodded consent,
grateful for the kindness of his friend’s voice, and went with him.
The way back to the little grove where they had first met seemed
much longer to Jeremy as he retraced it with feet that had begun to
drag and back that had begun to ache. When they reached it, the
young man hid his bicycle among the bushes, and asked Jeremy to
lead him. At the edge of the crevice he paused, and looked down
thoughtfully, rubbing his chin with one finger.
“It is just as you described it,” he murmured. “I can see the tabletop.
Did you look inside when you had got out?” It had not occurred to
Jeremy, and he admitted it. “Never mind,” the young man went on,
“we’ll do that in a moment.” Then he made Jeremy explain to him
how the warehouse had stood, where Lime Court had been, and
how it fell into the side street. He paced the ground which was
indicated to him with serious absorbed face, and said at last: “You
understand that I haven’t doubted what you told me. I felt that you
were speaking the truth. But you might have been deluded, and it
was as much for your own sake....”
Jeremy interrupted him eagerly. “Couldn’t you get the old records, or
an old map of London that would show where all these things were?
That would help to prove the truth of what I say.”
The young man shook his head doubtfully. “I don’t suppose I could,”
he answered vaguely, his eyes straying off in another direction. “I
never heard of such things. Now for this....” And turning to the
crevice again he seized the tabletop and with a vigorous effort
wrenched it up. As he did so a rat ran squeaking from underneath,
and scampered away across the grass. Jeremy started back
bewildered.
“You had a pleasant bedfellow,” said the young man in his grave
manner. Jeremy was silent, struggling with something in his memory
that had been overlaid by more recent concerns. Was it possible that
he was not alone in this unfamiliar generation? With a sudden
movement he jumped down into the open grave and began to search
in the loose dust at the bottom. The next moment he was out again,
presenting for the inspection of his bewildered companion an oddly-
shaped glass vessel.
“This is it!” he cried, his face white, his eyes blazing, “I told you I
came to see an experiment——” Then he was checked by the
perfect blankness of the expression that met him. “Of course,” he
said more slowly, “if you’re not a scientist, perhaps you wouldn’t
know what this is.” And he began to explain, in the simplest words he
could find, the astonishing theory that had just leapt up fully born in
his brain. He guessed, staggered by his own supposition, that
Trehanoc’s ray had been more potent than even the discoverer had
suspected, and that welling softly and invisibly from the once excited
vacuum-tube which he held in his hand, it had preserved him and the
rat together in a state of suspended animation for more than a
century and a half. Then with the rolling of the timbers over his head
and the collapse of the soft earth which had gathered on them, the
air had entered the hermetically sealed chamber and brought
awakening with it.
As his own excitement began to subside he was checked again by
the absolute lack of comprehension patent in his companion’s face.
He stopped in the middle of a sentence, feeling himself all astray.
Was this ray one of the commonplaces of the new age? Was it his
surprise, rather than the cause of it, which was so puzzling to his
friend? The whole world was swimming around him, and ideas
began to lose their connection. But, as through a mist, he could still
see the young man’s face, and hear him saying seriously as ever:
“I do not understand how that bottle could have kept you asleep for
so long, nor do I know what you mean by a ray. You are very ill, or
you would not try to explain things which cannot be explained. You
do not know any more than I what special grace has preserved you.
Many strange things happened in the old times which we cannot
understand to-day.” As he spoke he crossed himself and bowed his
head. Jeremy was silenced by his expression of devout and final
certainty, and stifled the exclamation that rose to his lips.
 CHAPTER IV
DISCOVERIES

1
HOW and when Jeremy’s second unconsciousness overtook him he
did not know. He remembered stumbling after his friend down the
uneven road he had now begun to hate. He remembered that the
heat of the day had grown intense, that his own dizziness had
increased, and that he had been falling wearily over stones and from
one rut to another. He had a dim recollection of entering the street he
had seen before, and of noticing the odd effect produced by
twentieth-century buildings sagging crazily forward over a rough
cobbled roadway. But he did not remember his sudden collapse, or
how his friend had secured a cart and anxiously bundled him into it.
He did not remember the jolting journey that followed, as speedy as
the streets of this new London would allow.
He came to himself in a bed in a little, bare, whitewashed room
through the windows of which the westering sun was throwing a last
golden flood. He sat up hastily, and saw that he was alone. At his
side on a small table stood a metal dish holding a thick slice of bread
and some leaves of lettuce; and by the dish there was a mug of
rudely glazed earthenware. His mouth was dry and his tongue
swollen; and he investigated the mug first. He was rewarded by a
draught of thin but, as he then thought, delicious ale. He immediately
set to on the bread and lettuce, and thought of nothing else till he
had finished it. When he had scraped together the last crumbs and
his first ravenousness had given way to a healthy and normal
hunger, he looked about him with more interest.
The room, his first glance told him, was bare even to meanness. It
held nothing but the bed in which he lay, the table and a large,
cumbrously-made wooden chest which stood in the further corner.
The walls, as well as the ceiling, were covered with a coarse
whitewash which was flaking here and there; and there was a square
of rough matting on the boards of the floor. Jeremy, quite awake and
alert now, wondered whether, after all, he had not been taken to an
asylum, perhaps—and this seemed most probable—to the infirmary
of a workhouse. The sheets on the bed and the nightshirt in which he
found himself, clean but of very coarse linen, seemed to support this
theory. On the other hand, if it were correct, ought he not to be in a
ward with the other patients? And was it usual in the workhouses of
this age to have mugs of ale by the bedside of unconscious men?
Curiosity soon stirred him farther; and he put one foot cautiously to
the ground. He was reassured at once by a sensation of strength
and health; and he slipped out of bed and went to the window. Here
he met with another surprise; for it was glazed with small leaded
panes of thick and muddy glass, such as was becoming rare in his
own time even in the remotest and most primitive parts of the
country. And a brief examination showed that the window was
genuine, not merely a sheet of glass cut up by sham leads to give a
false appearance of antiquity. Puzzling a little over this, and finding
that he could not see clearly through the stains and whorls in the
glass, he undid the window, and thrust his head out. Below him
stretched spacious gardens with lawns and shrubberies, fading in
the distance among tall trees, through which buildings could just be
discerned.
As he leant out he could hear the voices of persons hidden
somewhere beneath; and he was straining forward to catch their
meaning when a hand fell on his shoulder. He looked round with a
start, and saw his friend carrying a pile of clothes over one arm, and
smiling at him pleasantly.
“Well,” said the young man, “I’m relieved to find you awake again. Do
you know that you’ve lain there since before noon, and that it’s now
nearly six o’clock? I began to think that you’d fallen into another
trance.”
“Where am I?” Jeremy asked bluntly.
And the young man replied with simplicity: “This is the Treasury. You
know, I’m one of the Speaker’s Clerks.” And then seeing Jeremy’s
stare of bewilderment, he went on: “Or perhaps you don’t know. We
have apartments here in the Treasury during our term of service, and
dine in the Great Hall. This room belongs to another of the Clerks.
Luckily he’s away on a journey, and so I’ve been able to borrow it for
you. And that reminds me that though you told me a great deal about
yourself, you never told me your name.” Jeremy told him. “And
mine’s Roger Vaile. Now I think you ought to get dressed, if you feel
strong enough.”
But Jeremy’s bewilderment was by no means dissipated. “The
Speaker? The Treasury?” he inquired disconnectedly.
The young man whose name was Roger Vaile laughed in a good-
humored way. “Didn’t you have them in your time? It’s not much use
asking me, I’m afraid. I know so little about the old times that I can’t
tell what will be new to you, and what you know already. But you
must know who the Speaker is?”
“Yes ... I suppose so ... the Speaker of the House of Commons,”
Jeremy began. “But——”
Roger Vaile looked perplexed in his turn. “N-no—I don’t know ...
perhaps ... he’s ... oh, he’s the ruler of the country—like a king, you
know.”
“But why is he called the Speaker?” Jeremy persisted.
“Oh, I suppose because he speaks for the people, who know more
about these things than I do. Now that’s evident, isn’t it? But I’ll find
some one for you; you’d better dress,” he concluded, making for the
door, plainly anxious to avoid further questions. “Dinner’s served at
half-past six. I’ll call for you.” He escaped, but returned in a moment
to say: “By the way, I’ve told no one anything about you. I’ve only
said that I’m entertaining a friend from the country.”
“Thanks ... oh, thanks,” Jeremy replied hastily and rather foolishly,
looking up from his manipulation of the garments which Roger had
disposed on the bed. They proved, however, on examination, to be
the least of the problems at that moment confusing his mind. They
were, in fact, exceedingly like the evening dress to which he was
accustomed. A kind of dinner-jacket with coarsely woven silk on the
lapels was substituted for the tail-coat, and the shirt was made of
heavy, unstarched linen, and had a soft collar attached to it. The
socks were of thick and heavy silk; but the cloth of the coat,
waistcoat and trousers, which turned out, under closer inspection, to
be dark purple instead of black, was as soft and fine as could be
desired. The shoes were more unusual. They were of fine leather,
long and pointed and intricately adorned, and their color was a rich
and pleasing green.
Jeremy had no trouble in dressing; but when he had finished he was
made a little uneasy by what he could see of the result. He
supposed, however, that his costume was that of a well-dressed
young man of the period, though it did not fit him at all points as he
could have wished; and he sat down on the bed to wait as tranquilly
as he could till Roger should call for him. Tranquillity, however, was
not to be had for the asking. Too many questions beset his mind; and
though he had a wealth of observations on which to reflect there
seemed to be at once too many and too few. He certainly had never
believed that the Millennium was somewhere just around the corner,
waiting to be led in by the hand of Science. But he had held the
comfortable belief that mankind was advancing in conveniences and
the amenities of life by regular and inevitable degrees. Yet all that he
had seen so far seemed to be preparing an overthrow of this
supposition no less direct and amazing than the revelation he had
received when he looked for the houses of Whitechapel and found
that they were no longer there. The mere fact that a whole quarter of
London had been destroyed and had never been rebuilt was in itself
significant. The condition of the still inhabited houses which he had
seen was strange. The clothes he wore, the sheets on his bed, the
glazing of his window, pointed to an unexpected state of affairs. And
Roger Vaile’s attitude towards the scientific theories which Jeremy
had so guilelessly spread before him was perhaps the most striking
phenomenon of all. Jeremy sought vainly for words which would
describe the impression it had made on him. Could a savage have
looked otherwise if you had explained to him the theory of atomic
weights? And the Speaker, who spoke for the people ... and the