Archive for the ‘Research’ Category
Posted by Gayle Gifford on October 2, 2009 in Effectiveness, Good reads, Research, Strategic Thinking
Here’s a new must read if you care about small nonprofits: “Outsourcing back office services in small nonprofits: Pitfalls and Possibilities.”
Thank you so to my colleague and friend Jane Arsenault of FioPartners for forwarding this report. (If you are interested in nonprofit alliances and haven’t read through Jane’s 1998 book Forging Nonprofit Alliances, you’ve been missing one of the pioneering works on this topic).
“Outsourcing back-office services…” is a study conducted by the Management Assistance Group for the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation of Washington, D.C. It confirms through a study of Meyer grantees, industry experts and other literature what many of us have been thinking about, wishing for and experimenting with for a number of years.
Among the findings:
- Outsourcing may present an opportunity for small organizations to improve their back office.
- There may be new for-profit business opportunities in providing these services.
- Because of their small size and lack of spending on any back office, outsourcing doesn’t offer immediate cost savings for most small organizations. But the report goes on to say that it could help free time for more focus on program and strategy.
- Outsourcing needs to be approached cautiously by both organizations and their funders.
Large nonprofits and nonprofit networks have been outsourcing many back office functions for years. In our experience, small nonprofits haven’t been profitable enough for for-profit businesses to service. The lack of money to be made providing these functions has been a real barrier to the development of many services from which small organizations could benefit.
And small organizations simply haven’t had the time, expertise or money to solve this problem for themselves.
Across the country, larger nonprofits are stepping up to provide some of these services. All types of creative arrangements have been developed that don’t force small organizations to merge and thereby dissolve the important, close constituency and localized advocacy work that so many of our smallest nonprofits provide.
With the current economic crisis and a renewed interest in exploring nonprofit joint ventures, the time may finally be right for a thousand flowers to bloom in this area.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on July 14, 2009 in 100 Things We've Learned, Big ideas, Good reads, Helpful sites, Research, Strategic Thinking
Today is definitely a web discovery kind of day. It started this afternoon when I received an email from The TCC Group heralding a new study they released called “The Sustainability Formula.”
The Sustainability Formula is based on an analysis of TCC’s Core Capacity Assessment Tool.
The formula is:
Leadership + Adaptability + Program Capacity = Sustainability.
I really liked this framework (though I think there might be a few missing pieces of the definition, for example, how about something around longevity? Or resilience as in – the ability to bounce back from adversity).
I’m working on a project now with the Rhode Island Foundation’s Initiative for Nonprofit Excellence that enlists an organization assessment tool by the Marguerite Casey Foundation that is framed around the 4 Core Capacities developed by TCC. So I was particularly interested in reading this report.
But my really amazing discovery was captured in one small paragraph at the bottom of page 2. It talked about nonprofit lifecycles and offered a framework that I hadn’t bumped into before. The stages went like this:
“Stage 1: Core program development
“Stage 2: Infrastructure development for the purpose of taking programs to scale
“Stage 3: Impact expansion which is defined as community leadership that changes the systems and policies that affect an organization’s ability to achieve its mission.”
I was floored, I have to admit it. One of those AHA! moments.
Some people have AHA! moments by finding the wreckage of the Titanic on the ocean floor. I have them when I discover amazing new organizational frameworks or research nuggets that challenge our sector’s core assumptions. (Or when I eat some really fabulous dark chocolate)
This was SO MUCH MORE VALUABLE than the typical “Start Up, Growth, Maturity, Decline/Renewal” lifecycle model I see so often. This was a lifecycle framework that was MISSION-focused.
Be still my beating heart.
As someone who tries to pay attention to new literature on nonprofits, I kept scratching my head on how I could have missed this gem. So of course I went on a Google journey to find more details about this model.
After a nonproductive search on TCC Group’s own website (though there are lots of interesting publications there), I ended up on The Philadelphia Foundation’s website where I found the article “Characteristics of High Performing Nonprofits based on Organizational Lifecycle.” Which I spent time reading.
That article referenced a 2005 BoardSource publication, Navigating the Organizational Lifecyle: A Capacity Building Guide for Nonprofit Leaders I had seen the book as a subscriber to BoardSource but I never ordered it because I figured it was just the same old same lifecycle framework. That will teach me to assume!
Yes, you may be asking about now, other than alerting your readers to all these great resources, what is the point of this blog entry?
Okay, here it is.
I regularly encounter individuals, usually good-hearted souls, who have done little research on best practices about how to build a great nonprofit. Or how best to build effective programs that address the problems or needs they’ve taken on. I’m always curious, when there is such great stuff out there usually for free, why they didn’t take the time to look.
Maybe they’ve taken to heart the old adage about curiosity killing cats and been scared away?
My problem is just the opposite. I rarely have difficulty finding really valuable information – besides Google, I’ve got great colleagues and Twitter to keep me busy.
No, my problem is trying to tear myself away from the next great read.
So, a word of advice: Try some research. You can learn a whole lot by looking, to paraphrase the great Yogi Berra.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on February 20, 2009 in Big ideas, Nonprofit Highlights, Research
I went back to www.GivingMarketPlaces.org today to see if they had answered my question about the data used in the report I mentioned a few days ago The Nonprofit Marketplace: Bridging the Information Gap in Philanthropy. In the way that the web works, I found myself on the TacticalPhilanthropy Blog which mentioned that the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which partnered with McKinsey & Co to produce this report had funded an organization called GiveWell.
From what they say on their web site, GiveWell was founded and is staffed by some former hedge fund managers. They have set themselves up as an “independent evaluator” to do “detailed analysis” of nonprofit organizations and then to recommend to donors whether to give to those organizations or not.
GiveWell says they reviewed 136 nonprofits and only 4 came highly recommended! I was absolutely amazed by the list of organizations that were “Not Recommended” for donor giving including the American Red Cross, UNICEF, Technoserve, and the Girl Scout Council of Greater New York.
It appears that the primary reason most organizations were “Not Recommended” was because they didn’t give GIveWell the right kind of information. I doesn’t surprise me that such an internationally respected Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on December 19, 2008 in Big ideas, Research
Don Griesmann reminded me today in his blog about one of my pet year end peeves… the charity ratings that pop up in magazines like Forbes or are published on self-proclaimed watchdog sites like Charity Navigator. (I get particularly incensed at a business magazine editor claiming to know what the most effective charities are — give me a break.) With just under a million public charities in the US, there is no way that anyone could possibly know of every charity that is doing a great job.
One enormous hole in these rating systems is the lack of a handy report to measure societal impact. And you know that these raters are not investigating each and every charity firsthand. So these rating systems are mostly based on the information that can be gleaned from the Form 990. This results in too much attention on finances, in particular the ratio of program vs management/fundraising expenditures.
While it is a noble pursuit to try to help the public make more informed decisions about the charities they donate to, unfortunately, there is no easy rating system for measuring community benefit.? Here’s the problem with using low overhead as the determinate of effectiveness: Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on September 26, 2008 in Fundraising, Nonprofit Highlights, Public engagement, Research
I spent an hour yesterday in a lively phone conversation with the drafters of “Drowning in Paperwork, Distracted from Purpose” a report on the challenges and opportunities in improving grant application and reporting. The call was hosted by the Association of Fundraising Professionals which is one of the partner organizations participating in Project Streamline, a collaborative initiative of the Grants Managers Network.
Though I’ve already referenced this effort in an earlier posting, I wanted to remind you to go the the website of Project Streamline, download a copy of the report and its recommendations, and add your feedback to the discussion.
Some of the things we talked about on our conference call:
The need to rightsize the application process to the amount of the grant.
The need to focus proposal writing on the right stuff, (program and results), and not take up time with excessive paperwork.
The need for better online application processes (ones where you can save your document, copy and paste, print out versions to check, etc).
The need for open source final reports so that our colleagues can learn from our experiences (rather than reports locked in a file cabinet that no one pays attention to).
The report is a good read. It may confirm all of your frustrations. If a fair amount of your revenues come through private foundation grants, it’s well worth your involvement, especially if you have recommended solutions to the problems addressed.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of grants and contracts which nonprofits receive come through the government … which isn’t a beneficiary of this study. But the project sponsors were urged to share the report with government grantmakers anyway as they may benefit from its recommendations.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on August 18, 2008 in Fundraising, Research, Tidbits
Have you been wondering how effective email fundraising campaigns are? M&R Strategic Services and NTEN have released a eNonprofit Benchmarks Study that you can download for free.
An interesting stat from the report about online fundraising: In the 21 non profits participating in the study, the average email fundraising response rate was 0.13% in 2007 with an average gift of $87.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on August 7, 2008 in Little ideas, Research
Sitting in the file cabinets of most foundations are hundreds of thousands of final reports from grantees on projects funded by those foundations.
For some time I’ve been thinking that it is a shame that all that great learning is locked away, inaccessible from others who might put those lessons to good use.
Call it Open Source grant reporting.
My dream is to see all those reports made available on the web. Imagine that you’re sitting in Iowa and thinking about launching an arts mentoring program for high school students. Wouldn’t it be great if your initial googling would not only surface the names of other nonprofits that run arts mentoring programs for you to call, but also produced links to the dozens of reports reflecting on arts mentoring programming from start up to roll out?
I can picture researchers mining these reports and preparing national “lessons learned” papers that can be shared across the industry. Or program officers skipping right away to implement “what worked” rather than rehashing the same missteps and dead ends.
Kudos to those foundations and others who make their final reports available to their colleagues throughout the US. But why wait for the foundations. What if nonprofits posted their own grant project reports on the web to share with their colleagues?
Insanity you say? Who would want to expose themselves in this way?
Even just having short summaries on the web to tempt us would be a great start. Then we could “call for a copy of the full report.”
What do you think? Doable?
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on August 4, 2008 in Big ideas, Nonprofit Highlights, Public engagement, Research, Strategic Thinking
Before network weaving and social capital became the buzz words, the John H. Chafee Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor was quietly inventing collaboration and community building on a bi-state scale in their small corner of New England.
I wanted to unearth the case study about the Corridor as I believe that nonprofits and their funding partners can learn a lot from their story.
The John H. Chafee Blackstone River Valley Heritage Corridor spans 24 cities and towns in Connecticut and Massachusetts. It is the cradle of the industrial revolution in America, the story of the technological and economic shift from field to factory Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on July 24, 2008 in Big ideas, Nonprofit Highlights, Research, Strategic Thinking
I joined a group of colleagues Tuesday night to talk more about Passion & Purpose, 
the recent report from The Boston Foundation.
A number of questions emerged that are worth a conversation among our colleagues and with nonprofit funders. I’d like to share those with you:
- Is this the right model for evaluating the financial health of nonprofits?
- Do we agree with this assessment and presentation of the issues and recommendations? Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on June 20, 2008 in Big ideas, Research
I’m continuing to digest the report Passion & Purpose issued this month by The Boston Foundation – the report analyzes the financial health of nonprofits in Massachusetts and makes a series of recommendations for the sector.
As I mentioned in my first post, the report lumps all nonprofits with budgets above $250,000 and below $50 million into one category that the authors call “Safety Nets.”
I have a very hard time reducing the performing arts, historical societies, art museums, conservation, environmental education, youth development, international development, philanthropy, peace and justice, women’s rights, and civil rights, to name a few, to the descriptor “Safety Net.” To me, this characterization grossly diminishes the societal benefit that these types of organizations provide. Read More >>
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