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.