Posts Tagged ‘Effectiveness’
Posted by Gayle Gifford on June 11, 2010 in Effectiveness
I was just flipping through my dog-eared edition of “Good to Great and the Social Sectors,” the 2005 monograph by Jim Collins, when I came across this advice:
“It doesn’t matter whether you can quantify your results. What matters is that you rigorously assemble evidence — qualitative or quantitative — to track your progress. If the evidence is primarily qualitative, think like a trial lawyer assembling the combined body of evidence. If the evidence is primarily quantitative, then think of yourself as a laboratory scientist assembling and assessing the data.”
Collins goes on to say that being hard isn’t an excuse for not attempting to measure performance. “All indicators are flawed,” he reminds us.
But, prescient of the charity raters, Collins reminds us that it is important to be curious to learn for its own sake, in pursuit of the greatness to which we aspire. (For me, greatness means really taking on social challenges – making the world the best it can be – whatever your cause.)
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on April 27, 2010 in Effectiveness
Thank you to self-described philanthropy wonk Lucy Bernholz of Philanthropy Blog 2173 for alerting us to the resource “A Guide to Actionable Measurement” put out by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I’m preparing materials for two workshops on why measuring societal impact is important and this couldn’t have been dropped in my lap at a better time.
Just yesterday, I was discussing the framework for one of those sessions with a board member who will be at this retreat and has been thinking carefully about this topic. The retreat I’m preparing is designed to help program staff and board members learn to love evaluation — okay, maybe not love yet, but appreciate the importance of.
We both agreed that the conversation about measurement needs to shift away from evaluation, which conveys judging, to learning, which is about a desire to get better at what you do for the sake of the people or community you serve.
So let me say I was cheering when I read the three principles that The Gates Foundation says guide its approach to measurement:
- “Measurement should inform specific decisions and/or actions.
- “We do not measure everything, but we do strive to measure what matters most.
- “The data we gather help us learn and adapt our initiatives and strategies.”
Hallelujah.
Their formula for actionable measurement is just brilliant in my book:
“Planned collection, analysis and synthesis of data + time devoted to development of reflection and insight + willingness and ability to change = Informed Decisions & Actions”
With the growing drumbeat to rate and rank nonprofit outcomes, it is refreshing to hear such an important funder talk about reflection, insight, adaptation, learning. I’m also impressed that this foundation that has more money than any of my clients could ever dream of makes a point that they are judicious about what they measure as they can’t (and shouldn’t) try to measure everything. Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on April 9, 2010 in Better Boards, Big ideas, Strategic Thinking
With the extremely poor financial condition that states are experiencing and the coming wave of dramatic cutbacks in state and local funding of services delivered through nonprofits (one colleague noted close to 15 nonprofits on the financial brink in her Florida community), one would think that boards would crave new thinking around program delivery, organizational structure, partnership or cost reduction.
But a conversation yesterday brought back to me a dynamic that I’ve been observing for many years: the role of boards as conservators.
A little background.
Yesterday I made my bi-annual trek to life portfolio company New Directions to discuss life in the nonprofit sector with their clients. New Directions clients are accomplished people in business or the professions who are designing the next stage of their life journeys.
My portion of the conversation was “The rewarding and confounding world of the nonprofit sector,” which is partly nonprofit 101 and partly DEEP THOUGHTS.
A fellow “interpreter of the sector” was the Executive Director of a capacity building (smallish, $500K budget) nonprofit. He mentioned that for the last two years he had been a co-executive director, a leadership team that resulted from a merger. He mentioned that the other ED was winding up his term and he would soon be the sole ED. When I asked how the co-directorship worked for him, he shared he really liked the arrangement, but his Board just wasn’t comfortable with the shared leadership model.
Boards as Conservators
At first a bit surprised by this tale, it reminded me that many boards are naturally suited to their role as conservators.
Here I’m using conservator in its definition as someone who conserves or keeps safe. Like a custodian, guardian, or protector.
The words we use to describe board duties — like prudent, loyalty, care, fiduciary — imply moderation and caution. Another word I might use would be “conservative.”
In my experience, most Boards of Directors are loathe, and rightfully so, to take big risks. In their conservator role, boards put the breaks on reckless spending. Because boards usually reflect the mindset of the communities they serve, they often restrain choices, decisions or actions Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on January 22, 2010 in Effectiveness
It’s been a very interesting week.
My post on Tuesday, “My worst nightmare is now true, sloppy ratings ratings of nonprofit effectiveness in Hatii,” and a storm of Tweets generated quite a bit of attention.
As Tuesday’s post explains, after my first critique, Guidestar changed their hastily constructed home page listing Top Ten Relief Organizations Working in Haiti, which I strongly debated the evidence for, to a somewhat more accurate Most Reviewed Relief Organizations in Haiti.
After a long conversation this afternoon with Debra Snider, Guidestar’s VP of Communications and Administration, and Shari Ilsen, Director of Marketing and Outreach at GreatNonprofits, Guidestar made the laudable decision to drop the listing altogether.
Now when you land on Guidestar’s homepage and scroll down, you’ll see Disaster Action Center and encouragement to post a review if you have firsthand experience with an organization working in Haiti. A link takes you to the site of GreatNonprofits.
Why is this so much better? Read More >>
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Posted by Jon Howard on October 28, 2009 in Big ideas, Fundraising
The genius of the subscription marketing model lies in flipping the vast power of personal inertia from “don’t buy” to “buy.” How can we in the nonprofit world convert many separate donation decisions into the one long-term commitment of subscription? How can we help our most loyal supporters make “donate” their default setting?
That’s what “Looking at Life as One Big Subscription” by Damon Darlin of the New York Times got us thinking about recently.
Magazines, gym memberships, cell phone plans, online computer backup services and cable TV all rely on variations of the subscription business model. Netflix has used this old model to transform the movie rental business. The details vary but the basic subscription model has the consumer pay (or at least commit to pay) up front for access to a product or service over a period of time.
Consumers get reliable and often privileged access to the offering, usually at a compelling discount. Providers get an assured revenue stream and reduced marketing costs. Even better, they get paid whether or not customers actually use their cell phones or gym memberships.
As Isaac Newton taught us, bodies at rest tend to stay at rest. Subscribers must get off the couch and take an action to cancel the agreement. As long as providers don’t anger them with bad service, most subscribers will sit back and let the revenues flow.
Does this powerful business model work for philanthropy? Well, symphony orchestras and museums already use the subscription model with season tickets or admission-based memberships. However, they actually provide goods and services over time directly to the consumer, more or less like a for-profit business.
What about the usual three-cornered nonprofit proposition where A gives money to B to deliver a service to C? Direct self-interest doesn’t operate here. Still, one category of non-profits have used the subscription model to support service to third parties since the 1930s with great success. Can you name that nonprofit sector? Have you adapted the subscription model to fundraising?
I’ll provide the answer and look at what that example could mean for other nonprofit fundraisers in a future post.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on October 8, 2009 in Better Boards, Effectiveness
Are you ready to be rated on your results?
There is a snowball gathering momentum and mass rolling down the hill in the USA. Your board needs to pay attention to it now.
That snowball is the growing movement by independent intermediaries to develop simple rating systems for the very complex world of nonprofit performance and social impact.
As charitable giving has grown to over $300 billion annually in the US, it seems that the business world is now taking great interest. Those individuals who brought you the financial crisis have now decided that most charitable giving is misdirected (see this Fox Business News clip and you’ll get the picture). What the public really needs, they believe, are unbiased “intermediaries” to redirect charitable giving to the “best performing” nonprofits.
Funders are focused on measuring and publicizing nonprofit outcomes
A 2008 study released by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, called “The Nonprofit Marketplace: Bridging the Information Gap in Philanthropy,” outlines the desired objective:
“…a more efficient and effective nonprofit market would direct more funds to solving the world’s social problems faster and at a lower cost, thereby helping more people sooner. Reallocating just 10 percent of the current $300 billion annual fund flow to the best performers would have a similar effect as raising billions in new funds — with nowhere near the same cost in fundraising time and energy.”
Now, as much as I want to debate those assumptions, the train has already left the station.
For example, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has already provided seed funding to an organization called GiveWell which they are promoting on their website. They describe GiveWell as
“the sometimes controversial … independent, nonprofit evaluator of nonprofit organizations. A self appointed watchdog, it performs in-depth research to help people accomplish as much good as possible with their donations.”
Who are GiveWell? As listed on their web profiles, their staff are former hedge fund employees and recent college graduates (who appear to have little-to-no nonprofit experience). They boast on their website that they have already evaluated 500 nonprofits and only found four worthy of their top ranking!
While you may not have heard of GiveWell, you’ve probably heard of Charity Navigator. Ken Berger, its thoughtful President and CEO, has heard the criticisms of its 4 star ratings which assess only financial indicators and not nonprofit program performance.
Mr. Berger is aware of the criticisms of Charity Navigator’s limited perspective and determined
“to transform our evaluation system of charities to include two additional dimensions (beyond financial health) – accountability (including transparency) and outcomes.”(Emphasis added). Read more here
Charity Navigator has appointed an advisory group to help it design its system.
Is your organization attempting to measure outcomes at all?
We all know that measuring outcomes is one of the hardest tasks that most nonprofits and social benefit organizations face. And one of the most controversial.
Just look at the maelstrom stirred up by the US government’s No Child Left Behind Act which tests students to assess public school performance. Critics of the testing process point out many shortcomings including school cheating, lack of similar standards across states, the failure to test Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on July 28, 2009 in Big ideas, Effectiveness, Fundraising
A robust sector includes nonprofits big and small and in-between. Keep repeating that.
In her latest op ed piece in The Nonprofit Quarterly, “Mom and Pop Giving Over to Big Brother?,” editor-in-chief Ruth McCambridge, shares our concern about national trends that overlook the value of “small, locally controlled organizations to civic life.”
She goes on to note that small businesses have disproportionately shed jobs in this recession and cites examples that indicate that this may be the result of government policy directing recovery funds toward the biggest corporations and away from the small guys. Ruth worries whether this will be repeated for nonprofits as this Administration works with “large philanthropic organizations to craft … approaches to ’social innovation.’”
We have raised the same question in different forms in this blog . See Now I’m Worried – Who decides what is effective and who should be funded or Are nonprofits only safety nets? among other entries.
If we get too caught up in focusing funder attention on “taking programs to scale,” we are destined to overlook the critical community building that can only be done by small, in-the-neighborhood organizations. Or, those scale-ups may overlook the impact of design that is an adaptation to local circumstances that doesn’t scale well or shouldn’t be scaled but should be redesigned for a new locale or new population. Or, even more likely, we may tend to forget that social change depends on a continuum of organizations, people and actions to finally tip power balances and produce desired improvements.
Thanks to The Nonprofit Quarterly for using its national platform to continue to remind the top of the nonprofit infrastructure that this is a complicated world and that the contributions of the little guys can’t be dismissed or ignored.
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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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