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.