Demonstrating Accountability Ain't What it Used to Be
 Foundations need to demonstrate the impact on the community of the work of their local nonprofit grantees, as well as the impact of the foundation's own programs (such as civic leadership initiatives). To be able to take this to scale and offer community knowledge in next generation donor engagement opportunities, foundations must be able to collect and disseminate key information and due diligence analysis about nonprofit organizations within the community. Ideally, this information will be collected, analyzed and disseminated electronically, but foundations should start to measure impact now, with or without software support.
The push for more and better performance measurement has been ongoing in the nonprofit sector for some time now, with limited results. Noone is saying this work is easy, but new and interesting approaches are being pursued to evaluate outcomes.
The Skoll Foundation's Social Edge recently highlighted such efforts with an online event hosted by Debra Natenshon, CEO, The Center for What Works. The event, called, "Outcomes: The Common Language for an Efficient Nonprofit Marketplace," focused on the movement for an efficient online capital marketplace. Click here to access this Social Edge discussion. What are your efforts in this area? Share your thoughts on the issues highlighed by Debra:
- Power: Who has the power to establish outcome and indicator 'standards'?
- Privacy: Who will share what data under what circumstances? What do nonprofits feel about that degree of sharing? What data should be shared -- information describing the metrics they track? The data points / metrics themselves? Both? What will be publicly accessible?
- Resources: How can we afford to expend more time, money, and effort to publish more data? How can we make the process more efficient?
- Common outcomes across programs: What efforts are underway? Who have you worked with, and who else needs to be at the table, to make decisions about a common outcomes framework in your type of work?
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Measuring Impact |
Measuring Excellence |
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