Christian Leadership Alliance
| 
1 of 7
If You Want to Manage It, Measure It.
Seasoned managers know the Principle of Inspection all too well: "You get what you inspect, not what you expect." Also known as The Measurement Principle, this principle states "What gets measured gets done."
Although this principle is embraced without question in the for profit commercial world, nonprofit organizations have been slower to understand its criticality when it comes to effective performance management. There are no doubt many reasons why this is the case, but I suspect that several key reasons top the list.
First, many (most?) nonprofits and charities were founded by people motivated primarily by philanthropy and for religious or humanitarian reasons. Their goals have been the improvement of life as we know it, whether at the level of individual, family, neighborhood, community, nation, or the world. Because organizations are often the "lengthened shadows" of their founders, the cultures of these organizations were shaped in fundamental and powerful ways by the values of these founders. Unlike their counterparts in the business world, where the pursuit of profit and return on capital led to operational and financial processes demanding advanced quantitative analytical techniques, founders of nonprofits have pursued goals that were seen and felt as largely qualitative.
Second, because nonprofits have historically attracted staff who differed in significant ways in their values and education from their commercially oriented counterparts (for example, I've never met anyone who went to work for a nonprofit to become wealthy!), a great many nonprofits have been staffed by those educated in the liberal arts where quantitative analysis was simply not a priority.
Third, for many decades most donors relied more on the impression that nonprofits were doing a good work than they did on hard facts. Heartwarming stories were more important than lifeless statistics (one could argue that this is still very much the case) and the lack of intense competition among nonprofits made inter-organizational comparisons of productivity and cost-effectiveness secondary concerns at best.
True. As stakeholders, donors were figuratively buying "shares" in the organization's ability to produce life-changing, community-changing, or world-changing results, but few would have viewed their gifts through the cold rational-analytical lenses of "return-on-investment." In recent years a quiet donor revolution has taken place in the turbulent wake of the customer revolution, however, and new donor perceptions and expectations are in many cases changing the demands donors are making upon nonprofits. This, in turn, is "raising the bar" in terms of nonprofit performance and stakeholder reporting, and consequently, the importance of metrics.
635 Camino de los Mares, Suite 216, San Clemente, CA 92673 · (949) 487-0900