Power of Non-profits

This week readings on the measuring the effectiveness of non-profits and also the thoughts of Crutchfield and McLeod Grand about what makes great nonprofit great made me feel how powerful is the non-profit sector. This sector is balancing and insuring cooperation of other sectors with each other and with itself. It is the catalyst of dialogues and initiator of actions to raise closed and sensitive topics. Another major function of non-profits which makes them special is the filling of gaps. Non-profits are where the governments fail their obligations and they are where the business is damaging or violating.

This sector is the most “alive”, broad in terms of issues it is covering, adaptable and flexible one. It is easily transforming from one type to another, it has a capacity and right to add new approaches and drop non-functional ones very quickly. Non-profits are experts and leading agencies in many fields of service provision and they are the voice of public as they have very strong connections on grassroots’ level.

The effectiveness of non-profits is multidimensional and it cannot be assessed by a single indicator. This shows the big spectrum that non-profits usually cover. Even within one program we can observe several combination of activities to reach better impact, for example, service and education, service and advocacy or advocacy and publicity.

It will be always difficult to measure the effectiveness of this sector as it is not static. There cannot be developed any general mechanisms that will measure effectiveness or insure effective accountability of the non-profits and the major obstacle is that they are not identical, they all are different in their sizes, missions, governance styles, profiles, membership types and so on.