Demonstrating Effectiveness: Accountability for What Matters

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Notes from Put Barber, The Evergreen State Society

 

The challenge of demonstrating effectiveness affects nonprofits' communications with every audience.  Nonprofit organizations should place accountability in this sense at the center of their communications activities.  In fact, it might be better to identify these as the focus of an accountability department rather than by the more familiar term public relations.

 

Accountability is hard for nonprofits because of two well known characteristics of their work.  First, they depend in crucial ways on gifts, and gifts are deeply complicated transactions.  Donors, recipients, stakeholders and, of course, the community at large all have reasons for caring about the impact of gifts. But they it is all too easy for their understanding of how a gift is made and what it is to be used for to diverge, even when a great deal of time and care go into the relationship.  A further source of difficulty is the fact that many programs receive key support from sources that are not the focus of the activity or service.  This sort of divided transaction can be even more complicated when others in the community have a stake in the success of the program.

 

In today's session we will hear first from Rob Fleming, who heads up Clark Nuber's not-for-profit services, was for a time the chair of the Nor-for-Profit Committee of the Washington Society of CPAs and is now Chair of WSCPA,  He has a longstanding interest in the effective presentation of nonfinancial data for management and oversight purposes.  Then we will hear from Audrey Haberman, the Executive Director of the Pride Foundation, who will talk with us about the things they look for as they try to understand the programs and proposals the foundation reviews.

 

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Notes from Rob Fleming,  Clark Nuber

 

  1. Who are we accountable to?

 

    • External – Funders, government, clients
    • Internal – Board, employees, volunteers

 

  1. Why be accountable?

 

    • Pros – Moral responsibility, justify resource needs, management evaluations, improve overall performance, practical necessity, accountability drives performance.

 

    • Cons – Diverts resources from delivering services, counting and measuring v. doing and performing, law of unintended consequences, measuring the wrong performance

 

  1. What will you do with the measurements?

 

    • Results must cause action or consequences that benefit the organization 

         

  1. What will you measure?

 

    • One of the hardest decisions is selecting measurements and outcomes that are consistent with the organization’s mission.

           

  1. Examples

 

    • Blends performance with financial results (combines the two bottom lines of nonprofits)  

 

    • Formats include

            Inputs, outputs and outcomes

            Benchmarks for assessing results

      Graphs often provide a better understanding

 

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Notes from Audrey Haberman, Executive Director, Pride Foundation

Here are nine things to look for when thinking about whether a nonprofit is making an effort to be accountable:

  • Transparency.  Some organizations display a strong commitment to a culture of transparency in everything they do.

  • Reflective practices: Thinking about what you do and why. At the Pride Foundation, we ask our board members to fill out our own grant application and talk about whether the questions we ask make sense and the information we collect is what we need to know.

  • Playing well with others.  Some organizations gain and deserve a reputation for bringing honesty and equity to their relationships; that's a quality to admire.

  • Orientation toward a constituency, building strong relationships with people who care about the work.

  • Demonstrating an ability to change: listening and engaging with a wide circle of constituents.

  • Preferring actions over words.  It's a pleasure to read statements like "Our commitment to diversity is demonstrated in the following ways...." with a real list of accomplishments.

  • Frequent articulation of the organization's core values: an example is having the mission statement printed on the board agenda, or starting each meeting with a brief discussion of the meaning of something central about its work.

  • Evaluation: it's particularly important that it be emphasized internally -- not just what funders or regulators require.

  • Everyone involved is engaged in continuous learning about the meaning and effectiveness of the work being done.

 © 2003, The Evergreen State Society