Crutchfield, Grant, and McLeod in Chapter 8 talks about the three things that a nonprofit should do to keep the impact they are creating in their society. One of those things is to find the appropriate source of funding. By the way I found this article in internet that announces the Oregon legislature is moving closer to passing a bill that aims to punish Charities with high fund-raising costs. I think this is a big step towards transparency in nonprofit´s operation. Today we are talking about high costs for fund-raising, tomorrow the debate in the local legislative may be about the high salaries of nonprofit managers.
What do you think?
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
How much is enough?
As we read through the whole semester, we found useful reading materials that helped us build the criteria for our organization assessments. We found the Charity Navigator has listed many useful criteria, but we also felt some of the criteria might not be able to truly reflect an organization’s condition. In the last presentation, I saw our classmates have come up with some really important criteria.
How many pages will we need to make an objective assessment of an organization? We want to measure not only an organization’s output, but also outcome. The outcome can be very difficult to measure. In Charity Navigator, there is a whole list of questions for this measurement. And many of us found that getting the answers for some questions was very time-consuming. Still some classmates proposed to add case study section to show the social impact the organization has caused in the past. This is a very good suggestion, but is it realistic?
In this week’s reading, Crutchfeild and Grant talked about a steady funding source, overhead and staffs’ salary in nonprofit organization. I feel these are also very important, and a true reflection of them in an organization’s assessment would be very important, especially a steady funding source. But to merely objectively measure these, a long list of criteria can be developed. There can be so much that needs to be included in an objective assessment. Hopefully, organizations like Charity Navigator will come up with reader-friendly and effective measurement.
How many pages will we need to make an objective assessment of an organization? We want to measure not only an organization’s output, but also outcome. The outcome can be very difficult to measure. In Charity Navigator, there is a whole list of questions for this measurement. And many of us found that getting the answers for some questions was very time-consuming. Still some classmates proposed to add case study section to show the social impact the organization has caused in the past. This is a very good suggestion, but is it realistic?
In this week’s reading, Crutchfeild and Grant talked about a steady funding source, overhead and staffs’ salary in nonprofit organization. I feel these are also very important, and a true reflection of them in an organization’s assessment would be very important, especially a steady funding source. But to merely objectively measure these, a long list of criteria can be developed. There can be so much that needs to be included in an objective assessment. Hopefully, organizations like Charity Navigator will come up with reader-friendly and effective measurement.
DCMF YouTube Video
Hi all,
I wish this video (made by the David Cornfield Melanola Fund) had come to my attention back at the beginning of the semester, but I thought it was still worth posting about now. It's on YouTube.
I think this is a such an effective short film-- it's educational, but with funny lines spaced throughout. The people in it have real experiences with melanoma, and I think their stories are extremely memorable. They also do a great job of including a broad range of people. More relevant to our class material, the video ends with a call to spread the video on Facebook or Twitter-- and I have already seen it several times on friends' Facebook page. It's difficult to say whether the video will have a measurable impact on quicker diagnoses of melanoma, or on fewer cases as people learn to prevent it, but I think it will make a difference in some way.
What do you think? Is the video a bit too much? Would you spread it to your 16-year-old relatives or your Facebook friends?
I wish this video (made by the David Cornfield Melanola Fund) had come to my attention back at the beginning of the semester, but I thought it was still worth posting about now. It's on YouTube.
I think this is a such an effective short film-- it's educational, but with funny lines spaced throughout. The people in it have real experiences with melanoma, and I think their stories are extremely memorable. They also do a great job of including a broad range of people. More relevant to our class material, the video ends with a call to spread the video on Facebook or Twitter-- and I have already seen it several times on friends' Facebook page. It's difficult to say whether the video will have a measurable impact on quicker diagnoses of melanoma, or on fewer cases as people learn to prevent it, but I think it will make a difference in some way.
What do you think? Is the video a bit too much? Would you spread it to your 16-year-old relatives or your Facebook friends?
I Want Answers
After finishing Forces for Good, I found myself wanting more than the book is able to give. Let me explain. This book provides us with some "best practices" of high-impact nonprofits; however, at the end of the book, we are left wondering "How can I identify high-impact nonprofits?" This book does not really provide us with an answer to that question (and it wasn't intended to). Crutchfield and McLeod Grant (2008) explain the need for people to develop new ways to identify nonprofit organizations' impact in the following paragraph:
"Of course, it is harder to quantify the impact City Year has had through its advocacy efforts or its work with business. And information like this is not always published on an organization's Web site, let alone on ratings Web sites - you have to ask for it. We need new ways of measuring success in the social sector - and we need new systems and intermediaries to tackle this challenge" (p. 221).
While this book showed us what success looks like within a nonprofit organization, it didn't teach us how to measure success. Over the course of this semester, we've learned how difficult it is to come up with criteria to measure organizations' effectiveness and impact, and how difficult it is to assess organizations based on these criteria from their website content alone (as Kristen noted in class, and as Rebecca stated in her blog post for this week). In the years ahead, though, nonprofit leaders, funders, and other stakeholders will increasingly need to determine how to measure the impact of organizations, despite the difficulty in doing so. Perhaps in 10 or 20 years, Charity Navigator will have found the "answer" to measuring the impact of organizations, and perhaps we can help supply that answer.
"Of course, it is harder to quantify the impact City Year has had through its advocacy efforts or its work with business. And information like this is not always published on an organization's Web site, let alone on ratings Web sites - you have to ask for it. We need new ways of measuring success in the social sector - and we need new systems and intermediaries to tackle this challenge" (p. 221).
While this book showed us what success looks like within a nonprofit organization, it didn't teach us how to measure success. Over the course of this semester, we've learned how difficult it is to come up with criteria to measure organizations' effectiveness and impact, and how difficult it is to assess organizations based on these criteria from their website content alone (as Kristen noted in class, and as Rebecca stated in her blog post for this week). In the years ahead, though, nonprofit leaders, funders, and other stakeholders will increasingly need to determine how to measure the impact of organizations, despite the difficulty in doing so. Perhaps in 10 or 20 years, Charity Navigator will have found the "answer" to measuring the impact of organizations, and perhaps we can help supply that answer.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Too Focused on Process or Not Enough Focus on Results?
"Too often in this sector we let the tail wag the dog. We've become so focused on a process that at times we've forgotten to focus on results. We get caught up in measuring the wrong things, because the things that really matter are often more difficult to measure" (Crutchfield and Grant, 2008, p.28). I think this quote sums up the entire semester. We spent a lot of time this semester looking at a process and developing a process to evaluate organizations. We picked criteria to evaluate organizations based mainly off of the Charity Navigator website. However, last week we freely discussed the problems with our criteria. The main problem that most of us agreed on was that the criteria we chose came mainly from information off websites. This concerned us because as Kristen said "any idiot can build a website!" However, after evaluating different organizations based on this criteria, we almost all came to the conclusion that we wanted to donate funds to two organizations. I also think most of us could say that we felt confident that even though our criteria for choosing the organizations was not ideal, the organization we chose deserved the funds. So I ask everyone, did we spend an entire semester measuring the wrong things? Or did we become so focused on the process that we forgot to look at results?
Sustain The Impact in Nonprofit Art Organizations
In the Forces for Good, the author summarizes three critical elements to sustain impact in nonprofit organizations. I will take my internship in nonprofit art organization this summer, so I focus on how to apply them in art organizations.
People: develop a people strategy and invest heavily in top performers.
Capital: find the right sources of funding.
Infrastructure: invest in overhead, despite the pressure to look lean.
The last one is explained as "they needed to invest heavily in information technology, buildings, or management systems and build their own organizational capacity". The most significant difference between nonprofit art organizations and others is that they need someone has more knowledge in art (specific fields) than management skills. How to communicate between two groups of people is a tough question. Interestingly, in the organization I will work in, the bridge is internship student.
Internship students are divided into three groups: one for art, one for funding, and one for both. I belong to the last one. Two groups of people are in charge of different things: daily operations and fundraising. By this way, everyone in the organization can understand everything fast. It is a kind of leadership sharing. Moreover, everyone can play to their strengthen in the organization.
In Conclusion...
Throughout the course of this semester we have learned so much about accountability, impact, effectiveness, etc. Sometimes it seemed like we were reading a lot of the same stuff from week to week, but then in class new ideas would be brought up and it helped to gain even more insight into what we've been studying. I think the reading we were asked to do for this week is a great one to end on. In describing the hard work that the founder of Teach for America had to put in, the words "passionate and persistent" were used. This is exactly what it takes to make a difference. Yes, all of the things that we have discussed this semester are extremely important in the functioning of a nonprofit organization, but we must all remember that if we are to make a difference, we must always remember to believe in what we are doing and work as hard as we can to achieve what we set out to do.
Being able to be a part of the charity navigator project encouraged us to apply the things we have been learning in a real world setting. We were put in the position to actually make a difference. The last writing assignment gave us a chance to take everything we've learned this semester and decide what we thought the most important pieces were. It has been so great to work with such an intelligent and insightful group of people!
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