Organizations With Impact

In Forces for Good, Crutchfield and Grant write about the high impact nonprofit. The authors state there is no standardized definition of success in the nonprofit sector, as there is in the for-profit sector; because of this, they have a created a working definition of "impact," so as to be able to study various nonprofits. They focus on the organization's outputs, as well as whether the organization had impacted something larger, such as other nonprofits or public policy.

Although these are good measures of whether or not an organization has impact, I believe that there are also many factors that play a role in the organization's impact. Crutchfield and Grant chose not to look at the organization's that created impact only in their own communities, but these organizations can also create important change and improvements for citizens. The authors could also have studied not just the organizations' outputs, but also their programs' impacts-- how have they improved the situations that they set out to address?

The authors clearly could not have studied every variable, and I do believe that the ones chosen by the authors are valid and important. But I also think it's interesting to think about the other ways in which organizations can have impact. Do you think there are even more ways that are important? Or are Crutchfield and Grant spot-on with their chosen variables?