Yeah, Who’s Asking? Or, How Nonprofits Can be More Like For-Profits, Part the Second

Most nonprofits, from what I’ve seen, exist in the state that Thoreau called “quiet desperation.”  Or maybe James Thurber’s noisy desperation would be more accurate.  Anyhow, we’re desperate.  We lurch from anxiety to crisis and back, with occasional moments of temporary relief.

That’s our culture.  It’s written into the very word we use to define ourselves: nonprofit.  We cover all sorts of activities, from health to education to social services to environmental issues to the arts and many other realms of human experience.  The one thing we have in common is that we have chosen to engage in a brutal annual battle that by definition must result each year in either a loss or a tie.  This is the life we’ve chosen.

Well, it seems to me that we’ve made an implicit deal with ourselves: we’ll struggle along without any hope of profiting, organizationally or personally, from our labors as long as no one looks too closely at our results.

When I speak of results, by the way, I’m not talking about programs.  There’s an extensive literature on outcome-based program evaluation, and I’m by no means pretending to be a thought leader in that arena.

And I'm not talking only about fundraising.  I’m talking instead about all the administrative component of our organizations:  fundraising, earned income, worker productivity, marketing, human resources, etc.

In our world, we are usually permitted to feel that as long as we’re working hard, struggling and suffering, producing outputs and avoiding improprieties, it would be inappropriate to challenge our effectiveness.

We get points for going without sleep or answering three-week old emails at 2 am because it proves how dedicated and overwhelmed we are.  We justify ourselves by how hard we work and by our successes, rather than by how smart we work and by our results in comparison with reasonable but ambitious expectations. 

So I’m saying: let’s bring rationality to the nonprofit world.  Let’s institute the process of establishing numerical goals for all of the important thing we do and then analyzing how well we did.  I think our organizations would flourish.  And I think we would find our jobs more satisfying, since we’d have justification for eliminating those tasks we intuit are a waste of time and energy.

And perhaps most important, this accountability process should reach up to the board room.  So maybe some of those crazy organization directors we’ve all encountered, who seem to get by on a combination of intimidation and charm while their organizations founder, would finally have to answer for their behavior.  Wouldn’t that make it all worthwhile? 

It is hard for us to develop these systems because there’s so little precedent for doing so.  We don’t learn them in school and we don’t see them in action when we first get into the industry.  

And unlike for-profits, there is no group of shareholders who make or lose money based on our results.  So we don’t have these systems imposed on us from the top down.

Samuel Johnson wrote that "The prospect of the gallows concentrates a man's mind wonderfully.”  I think the same could be said about the prospect of missing your numbers and having to explain why in public.