Can five short questions change the nonprofit world?
Independent Sector, BBB Wise Giving Alliance, and GuideStar USA are collaborating on an effort to get charities to answer five fundamental questions about how they operate. The very process of answering the questions could help charities with strategic planning or describing themselves more clearly to the public, says proponents of the effort, called “Charting Impact.” If the idea catches hold, it could also provide a standardized framework through which to evaluate charities.
The five questions are:
* What is your organization aiming to accomplish?
* What are your strategies for making this happen?
* What are your organization’s capabilities for doing this?
* How will your organization know if you are making progress?
* What have and haven’t you accomplished so far?
The effort, supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, is currently being tested by a few dozen charities.
“We have a dream that some day these questions will be part of the conversation at all nonprofits,” says James Firman, president of the National Council on Aging and chair of the Independent Sector advisory group on nonprofit effectiveness.
At a session during the Independent Sector meeting on Thursday, Mr. Firman asked the audience for ideas about how to help the project gain momentum. Ideas ranged from paying charities a small stipend for answering the questions, to recruiting a group of foundations that would require charities to go through the question-and-answer process before receiving grants.
Art Taylor, president of the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, a watchdog group, said a charity could demonstrate a minimal level of competence and good governance merely by answer the questions.
“If they’re able to fill this form out, obviously they’ve had some successes,” he said.
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6 Responses to A Move to Encourage Charities to Focus on Results
ksilverman - October 22, 2010 at 3:25 pm
Why is this so revolutionary. Every grant application asks these questions. We constantly explain why we do what we do and how.
kenweimar - October 22, 2010 at 3:51 pm
a better list of questions
http://www.realgoodnotfeelgood.org
trybedo - October 23, 2010 at 1:06 am
I recently asked my staff colleagues,”How do we know if we are successful?” The result was our first ever Success Report that we are now sharing with interested parties and donors. It is vital that nonprofit organizations do a self-evaluation of the impact each of us are having. Another comment, was right though, there is nothing new in the questions as we answer them all the time. The real questions are: How effective are we? How do we know this? What more could we do to move our mission forward? Do we see a time when we can declare mission accomplished? What is keeping us from that?
lmcclary - October 24, 2010 at 8:23 am
Methinks the word short” in “…five short questions…” implies a simplistic one-size-fits-all approach. Where a dialog is certainly necessary and constant within all nonprofit organizations, it is also imperative to have a dialog about how these organizations can capture quantitative measurements to report on such questions. Does a charity that provides meals to the hungry want to see an increase in numbers served – does that show forward moving social change? Can an arts organization say it changed lives by an increase in number attending? Or is it more effective socially to see a charity’s numbers smaller yet producing real change? For instance, you can train 200 people with work skills, but if you have no jobs, what kind of impact can you say you have had…real social change is very difficult to determine. Let’s also view Charity and Social Enterprise as comrades, but understand that one may have a mission to be put out of commission and the other to stay in business. Realgoodnotfeelgood.org has great Social Enterprise questions.
researchsi - October 26, 2010 at 2:15 pm
Demonstrated and quantified impact is very critical for long term success and sustainability of any organization, especially non-profits. With greater demand for dollars, funders and donors are more critical of the requests and looking for organizations with proven impact. Think ROI-return on involvement. How involved/loyal are your donors, volunteers, even your staff? Is your organization focusing/pushing on the the key metrics of your mission success and growth? Are We should be asking these questions everyday!
wubbyman - November 17, 2010 at 11:34 am
We are currently doing work on behalf of the federal government to assist programs, ranging from abstinence education to responsible fatherhood and healthy marriage, to convey the outcomes of their programs in cost-benefit terms. Of course, the weakness for many programs is being able to say what their outcomes are. In the near term, we utilize programs that are similar in nature that have undergone more rigorous evaluation as a proxy for the results they acheive. We then examine the research literature to identify cost-benefits associated with those outcomes. The community-based programs we have trained have really taken to this method to improve their prospects for sustainability.