While I was exploring the website of BBB Wise Giving Alliance I was thinking about it as a great tool for potential donors and beneficiaries to learn about the particular organization and its operation. The same with Charity navigator that grants stars to the non-profits base on their financial statements. But later analyzing also past weeks’ readings and discussions I became somehow upset … I had a feeling that whatever I read was more encouraging competition and was teaching more how present the work you did to look better. Competition is stimulating improvement and in business field I see it as a great tool but in non-profit sector competition is more look like fight for funding and power. Who has more funding and can present better will have a right to “life” and “operation” in the field. But non-profits were not created for competing they were created for serving…I have a feeling that we forgot in reality what are issues in non-profits… the issues are to find effective ways to help people, serve people and work with people and our issues are not to find effective ways to promote and present what we do. It can be a small part of our operation but it cannot be the dominating goal of the non-profit.
I already have conflict with myself regarding indicators. Why do we so desperately want to incorporate indicators in our project operations? Do we really want them to measure effectiveness of our actions and learn from our experience or having perfect indicators for measuring results will contribute in our competition for “survival” ?
Zhanna,
ReplyDeleteYou've raised some good points. I think many people - including myself - would agree with you that the idea of nonprofits competing with each other makes them feel uncomfortable. However, I think competition for funding, particularly in this economic climate, is inevitable. There simply are not enough resources to go around, which means that nonprofits need to indicate in some way that they are effective in order to make an argument for them to receive funds over some other organization.
In response to your idea that nonprofits should focus more on serving people than promoting themselves -- I agree with this, in general; however, by promoting themselves, organizations will likely gain more funding, which will enable them to serve more people.
I would argue that you can look at competition in two ways: as a destructive force that leads to less capacity or choice in the nonprofit marketplace or as a constructive force, contributing to improvement in capacity and service delivery. Competition may provide important signals from outside the organization about what key stakeholders want from the organization. Competition may be a force for greater responsiveness...though it may also be possible for a large organization to dominate a community and challenge the ability of a competing organization to establish itself in the community.
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