I was thinking about this after I read an interesting article in the January 2010 edition of The Atlantic. The article, by Amanda Ripley, asks the central question of “What makes a great teacher?” In getting to this question, Ripley was given access to years of data compiled by the nonprofit group, Teach for America (TFA).  Through this analysis, TFA came to some central characteristics that make up a great teacher. They concluded that great teachers:

• Set big goals for their students.
• Continually look for ways to improve their effectiveness and constantly reevaluate their performance.
• Recruited students and their families into the process.
• Maintained focus, “ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning”.
• Planned “exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome”
• Worked “relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.”

When I looked at these characteristics I began thinking about the earlier classroom analogy between a great teacher and a great nonprofit. My thoughts on the comparisons, using additional analogies, are:

• Most nonprofit have lofty dreams. The difference between these nonprofits and great ones is that a great nonprofit’s mission and vision should remain lofty but its closely related goals are realistic and attainable. Many nonprofits often drive in circles toward what they believe is a goal, but really are endlessly driving around that lofty dream.

• Great nonprofits know that their march toward mission effectiveness is a constant working of a muscle, often adding a weight to the bar or altering a routine to reach their potential.  Often times ambitious nonprofits approach effectiveness like an audit, performing a Jiffy Lube exercise of creating and monitoring checklists to reach “effectiveness”.  Great nonprofits know their dashboard is on a moving trajectory that they are constantly working toward.

• Great nonprofits create an environment in which multiple players all have parts in their symphony, each one important.  Many nonprofits have conditioned themselves to believe that real participation into their success is to involve clients and partners in an obligatory bit role, ranging in activities like providing a feedback box for staff or having client representation on an executive or board committee.  Great nonprofits know that client and partner interaction needs to be intertwined into the operational fabric of the organization.

• Great organizations are experts at saying the word “No”.  “No” to Requests for Proposals that don’t meet the mission, “No” to a board member’s ambition that could take the organization astray, “No” to staff working from their own agenda, “No” to partners wishing to collaborate solely to obtain a resource.  While you may think that the word “No” creates an unmotivated environment, it’s actually the opposite in a great nonprofit.  The loud roar of the “Yes” significantly drowns out the diminishing whisper of the “No”.

• An easy test I often use when looking at an organization is to see if the threads of planning at the top reach the day-to-day work in the middle or at the bottom.  Successful nonprofit organizations are able to plan and create mechanisms to monitor planning throughout the organization.  Try this exercise: Grab an organization’s strategic plan, the ED’s most recent report to the board, the job description of a middle manager and that middle manager’s latest performance review.  Can you see some symmetry?  Poor organizations have little, average organizations have some and great nonprofits have a lot.

• Great nonprofits also say “No” to barriers that prevent them from mission success.  “No” to political roadblocks that may shut them out, “No” to technological forces that challenge them to connect and “No” to resource inflows that could be narrowing.  Like great teachers, great nonprofits are “relentless” and “refuse to surrender”.  This is what I like to call “Third Sector Grit” and is what makes the nonprofit world so great.

While I know that the classroom also has aspects that are different from a nonprofit, I do see a very close relationship to what TFA regards as a great teacher to what I regard as a great nonprofit.

John Brothers the Principal of Cuidiu Consulting, a Senior Fellow in executive leadership with the Support Center for Nonprofit Management, and an adjunct professor at New York University’s Wagner School for Public Service.

Giving continues to decline.

Echoing an ongoing downward trend in the charitable marketplace, a new study last week by the Council for Aid to Education reported a decline of 11.9 percent in charitable contributions to colleges and universities in the U.S.

And Dunham+Company, a consultant to Christian ministries, found in a recent survey that, despite a decline in the share of households that are spending less on monthly bills and entertainment, 37 percent of households expect to continue reducing their charitable donations.

And nearly one in four households have eliminated donations altogether, statistically the same as last year.

Experts on nonprofits and fundraising continue to urge organizations to take stock of their operations and programs, get their boards more involved in fundraising and strategic planning, and give personalized attention to givers and get them involved in their organizations.

This focus on basics requires leadership at the staff and board levels.

And leadership requires thinking big, asking questions and listening, telling stories that are authentic and compelling, and investing strategically.

A new study, Creative Disruption: Sabbaticals for Capacity Building and Leadership Development in the Nonprofit Sector, finds that sabbaticals can be “a relatively inexpensive but highly productive-building tool that yields measurable results.”

The recession is a time to take a hard look at business as usual, fix or eliminate what is not working, and build on what is working.

Now more than ever, nonprofits must be willing to invest in working smarter.

Todd Cohen, a veteran news reporter and editor, is editor and publisher of Philanthropy Journal, an online newspaper published by the A.J. Fletcher Foundation in Raleigh, N.C. Cohen has taught nonprofit reporting and media relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Duke University, and regularly speaks on the topics of nonprofit media relations and trends in the charitable world.

My first thought was: oh no, not another one. Not another nonprofit infrastructure group (those that provide capacity building, technical assistance, consulting, workshops, training, conferences, advocacy and research for the nonprofit sector) on the verge of shutting down. Like many of you, I have a personal connection to Idealist.org because I found my very first full-time nonprofit job on their website. My second thought was: the nonprofit sector needs Idealist. We can’t let it go down like this.
I expect Idealist.org to launch a “Save Idealist” fundraising campaign like so many other nonprofits have done in the past year. A local campaign here in DC that recently achieved major success was “Save WEAVE,” a call to the community to keep WEAVE open so they could continue to provide services to domestic violence victims in the city. But while some of the campaigns to save direct-service programs have been successful, Idealist.org will be the first nonprofit infrastructure organization to launch a public fundraising effort of this sort. (That I know of.)  For a non-direct service nonprofit, it’s hard to know what the response will be. As those of us who work in nonprofit associations or capacity building organizations know, it’s much harder to sell a nonprofit that helps other nonprofits than it is to raise money for a nonprofit that helps the poor. Believe me. I did it for over five years. It was tough. The pool of funding sources for non-direct service programs has always been slim, and is only getting slimmer.
Unfortunately, Idealist.org is not the only nonprofit infrastructure organization in financial trouble.

• Last September, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported that the Council on Foundations had laid off 16% of its staff amidst decreasing attendance at its meetings.
• The Nonprofit Times reported in April 2009 that the Association of Fundraising Professionals had plans to lay off 14% of its staff, despite record conference attendance that year.
• The Council of Nonprofits has also made a round of layoffs, and now seems to have less senior staff than in previous years. Last year, the Council also made the difficult decision to cancel its 2009 Nonprofit Congress.
• The Alliance for Nonprofit Management began making shifts in their operations in late 2008, with an ongoing series of candid and transparent messages from the Board to their members. Like this one: After difficult and thoughtful deliberation, the Board feels that the most responsible action we can take at this time in order to preserve the mission of the Alliance and insure that members continue to have a voice and place to go for support, is to make major reductions in our budget. These reductions have included restructuring the Alliance with a significant reduction in our staff and engaging a management company (Raffa & Associates) on a pro-bono basis, and one part-time interim program manager to manage the day-to-day functioning of the Alliance.

It makes me wonder, once again, what the future holds for nonprofit infrastructure groups. How are they planning to weather a financial storm that doesn’t seem to be letting up? How will organizations change their revenue models, management structures, and program offerings to be sustainable for the nonprofits they are tasked with helping? I’m thinking particularly of nonprofit associations as they gear up for the 2010 conference season. Are groups still moving forward with the traditional conference program model that costs attendees hundreds of dollars in registration fees and travel? Or are more folks getting hip to the idea of hosting “unconferences” like the amazing one I attended in DC called Social Justice Camp? It was free and it was awesome. And better than many of the nonprofit conferences that I paid big money for.
The ongoing financial and programmatic challenges for nonprofit infrastructure groups is what Clay Shirky meant by the “institutional dilemma.” I’m almost through reading his fantastic book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. You should read it, too. In the book, Clay talks about how technology has allowed for global collaboration to happen without the assistance of corporations to manage their work. How groups of individuals can effectively organize themselves for social change in lieu of operating under the umbrella of an established organization. To be sure, Clay’s book isn’t an indictment of traditional organizational models. He’s not saying that self-organizing groups of individuals will completely take over the role of “the institution.” But what he does do is point out the precarious nature of institutions:
In a way, every institution lives in a kind of contradiction: it exists to take advantage of group effort, but some of its resources are drained away by directing that effort. Call this the institutional dillemma – because an institution expends resources to manage resources, there is a gap between what those organizations are capable of in theory and in practice, and the larger the institution, the greater those costs.
What this means is that no matter how much we want Idealist.org or Council on Foundations or Council of Nonprofits or Alliance for Nonprofit Management to stick around, there will always be inherent challenges to what they are able to do for the nonprofit sector in the long-term. As Clay points out:
Running an organization is difficult in and of itself, no matter what its goals. Every transaction it undertakes – every contract, every agreement, every meeting – requires it to expend some limited resource: time, attention, or money. Because of these transaction costs, some sources of value are too costly to take advantage of. As a result, no institution can put all its energies into pursuing its mission; it must expend considerable effort on maintaining discipline and structure, just to keep itself viable. Self preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says. The problems inherent in managing these transaction costs are one of the basic constraints shaping institutions of all kinds.
The approach that several infrastructure groups have taken so far – layoffs, program cuts, management changes – seem to have had a positive impact to their financial bottom line, but I’m not sure that it translates into success for their respective missions. Do I want Idealist.org to stick around? Yes, of course. But I’m more concerned with preserving their mission versus their organization.

What do you think? Will new and better models begin to emerge that will be a win-win-win for nonprofit infrastructure organizations, their members and the nonprofit sector overall? Do you know of any that are bubbling up?

Rosetta Thurman is a writer, speaker, professor and consultant working and living in the Washington, D.C. area.  She holds a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management and blogs about nonprofits, leadership and social change at rosettathurman.com

Granted, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and a few others have keenly focused on the challenge of social outcomes and have dealt with them well. Yet many other efforts may end up misdirecting, even wasting, precious time and financial resources. In some extreme situations, well-intentioned efforts may actually risk producing adverse effects on nonprofits and those they serve.

To What End?
The main reason the dialogue on social outcomes is off track is because we have failed to keep our eyes fixed on the ends we are trying to advance. Every ounce of our effort on social outcomes should be with one end in mind: helping nonprofits create greater benefits for the people and causes they serve.

Most outcomes efforts today have drifted far from that end. Too often, measurement has become an end in and of itself.

- If greater benefits were the end, the sector’s dialogue on outcomes would be 95% about mission and 5% about metrics. Today, we have the ratio reversed.

- If greater benefits were the end, nonprofits would be driving the discussion about outcomes—not funders. Attempts to define outcomes seldom produce positive benefits when they are imposed on organizations from the outside.

- If greater benefits were the end, we would be working to help nonprofits clarify the end results they are trying to achieve. Achieving clarity of purpose produces increased benefits even if you never put a single metric in place!

- If greater benefits were the end, we would properly differentiate between operational performance and organizational effectiveness. What good is it to focus on an organization’s overhead costs or fund development levels if we don’t have a clue as to how effective the organization is at creating benefits for those it serves?

- If greater benefits were the end, we would own up to how much encouragement and support nonprofits need in order to define and assess what they do and how well they do it. We’ve approached this challenge as if it’s about numbers when it’s really about changing cultures. Changing culture requires large and persistent investments of time, talent, and money. 

Common Sense Left Behind
A vivid illustration of measurement run amok comes to us courtesy of No Child Left Behind.

Like most people, I believe we need ways to judge our schools and how well our students are doing. But No Child Left Behind does these things poorly. It’s the classic example of metrics over mission.

The current regime of “memorization and testing” and the growing battery of standardized tests risk rewarding targeted test preparation while not informing us or the students themselves whether they are developing the relevant skills and competencies they and our society and economy so sorely need. Yes, it’s very important to achieve—and measure—core competencies like reading and math. But where are the incentives for schools to educate young people to be curious, engaged citizens capable of critical thinking and problem solving? Where are the incentives to encourage collaborative development and learning? Where are the incentives to give students practical experience in the ways of life outside of school?

Too Hard on ‘Soft’ Outcomes
But I should be careful not to cast stones.

In the early years of Venture Philanthropy Partners, we got a lot of resistance to my push for “clearly defined outcomes” from leaders whose organizations placed a premium on being holistic with their services and functioning as “community builders.” Although I agreed with them in concept, I felt that a focus on “community building” was too soft to be a legitimate outcome. Outcomes related to “community building” are, after all, radically ambiguous compared to outcomes like reduction in teenage pregnancy and substance abuse.

I now see better that serving the entire family (holistic services) and building community are some of the very things that create the environment—a web of support and community—that helps youth avoid high-risk behavior, get an education, and prepare for college or a job. But talking about “community building” was too intangible, and not readily measureable to us at the time—and, candidly, difficult to sell to our own stakeholders and the emerging field of nonprofit performance at large.

I regret not being more open in my thinking back then. Instead of pushing back on what we were hearing, we should have done more to understand “soft” achievements that may in fact be every bit as real and important as “harder” outcomes. I aspire to do a better job of making them part and parcel of future efforts to assess outcomes and performance—even if that means using qualitative and/or anecdotal indicators.

The point is this: When public or private funders establish performance metrics and then tie significant rewards or consequences to their achievement, organizations and people will migrate to the behaviors that will allow them to meet their defined targets. If the metrics are appropriate and closely tied to mission, this is a good thing. But if the metrics are overly simplistic and unmoored from mission, then organizations will go racing in the wrong direction. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, they’ll get lost, but they’ll be making good time.

Shining Lights
Some nonprofits have made significant strides in adopting a culture focused on defining and achieving outcomes for the people they serve. One example is the Cleveland Clinic, which I serve as a trustee. The Cleveland Clinic, along with the Mayo Clinic and a few others, lead the field in their use of outcomes to assess their own effectiveness. The Cleveland Clinic now openly presents this information via its website.

Thanks to my good friends at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, in the field of human services I often hold up the work of Youth Villages. Youth Villages, which helps emotionally troubled children through a wide range of residential- and community-based treatment programs in 11 states, rigorously tracks all of the children it serves, during their treatment and often for two years after they discharge. In the words of CEO Pat Lawler, “The state…shouldn’t be buying beds; they should buy outcomes, successful outcomes.”

First Principles
We can help other nonprofit leaders achieve similar success if we refocus on the first-order question, “To what end?” To do that, we need to remember why we’re engaging in a discussion of outcomes in the first place: to help nonprofit leaders to be more effective—that is, to deliver greater benefits to those they serve. Doing so will provide the basis for the accountability we all seek.

Mario Morino, a former software entrepreneur, is the chairman of Venture Philanthropy Partners, based in Washington, DC.

Online, the process and attributes that succeed are traits you’d normally associate with an individual: authenticity, relationships, conversations, etc. Organizations should recognize the need for being “real” online and can honor that by, for example, putting in the profile information of organizational presences who is actually speaking from that account, sharing information, resources and links that aren’t only associated with the organization, and responding to people online to have conversations in public (even put a smiley face in there while you’re at it!).  When it comes to fundraising and the options available to individuals to campaign on your behalf online, think of the differences this way:

Offline: you would never have someone that has never met any staff of the organization, or even know where the organization is located, become so excited about the work it’s doing that he or she creates an annual campaign to raise funds on the organizations behalf and then goes through with it each year.

Online: that is already happening with people who use applications like Causes in facebook, which encourages users to fundraise each year on their birthday via their Birthday Cause tool (individuals select an organization, ask their facebook friends to give donations instead of presents, and the funds get distributed to the organization).

Offline: you would probably not have someone who’s had no physical connection with your organization be so excited about your work that they design and produce their own fliers about your work and then canvass their local community to raise awareness or your programs.

Online: that’s exactly what people are doing when they become a fan of your organization on facebook (adding your icon to their profile), add your twibon to their Twitter avatar (a little logo that is placed over the user’s picture), or even when sharing links or messages about your organization (even ones that you didn’t create) with their social networks.

So, how do you respond?

Like I said at the beginning, it’s important for organizations to move into the social media space using the processes that are accepted and successful, with the focus on being transparent and real, and so on.  Some key questions to ask yourself include:

• If people are supporting you by directly connecting with you on different social media platforms, what are you doing to encourage them to connect with you in a space where you have access to the data? (You can’t access your friends on facebook if the platform is down for maintenance, let alone if it goes down permanently!)
• If people are fundraising for you online, do you know about it? (Start looking for it!)
• If people are fundraising for you online, are you saying ‘thank you’ to the fundraisers and to the donors?
• If people are giving to you online on different social media platforms, are you encouraging them to connect with you directly so you can encourage them to give again later?
• How are you showing your gratitude for the hard work of your supporters (“volunteer” means something very different online!) online?

What do you think?

In this very different space for organizations, how has your organization adapted to the online culture and opportunities?  Do you have any tips or examples from your social media presences or campaigns to share?

You can review the slides from my whole presentation, as well as all of the speaker notes, here.

Amy Sample Ward’s passion for nonprofit technology has lead her to involvement with NTEN, NetSquared, and a host of other organizations. She shares many of her thoughts on nonprofit technology news and evolutions on her blog.