Category: The Outcomes Observer

It remains one of the most jarring things anyone has ever said to me, one of those unplanned, unguarded lines people occasionally utter that are completely crazy, but at the same time make a weird sort of sense. It was January of 2009, and the bottom was beginning to drop out.  If you were there, you’ll remember. The Great Recession was just starting to show the top of its ugly head on the horizon.  As Stephen King might say, people could not yet see it, but they could smell it.   The governor had announced unsettling predictions for the coming fiscal year and, in response, county officials had abruptly announced a freeze on as much spending as the law would allow. So there I was in the office of the deputy…

Those who have read this now-and-then series before might be interested in hearing about a friend who posted a story on Facebook. He and his wife were pulling into the parking lot of a Florida supermarket and soon noticed a woman trying to flag them down.  Their windows up and the AC on against the heat, they could not hear her, but assumed she was a panhandler.  They drove on a bit. She followed. They kept moving farther and farther away. It’s a good thing the woman gave up, because (knowing him) he might have driven to all the way to Georgia to avoid her…but it turned out she was trying to alert them to the fact that they’d somehow left the gas cap dangling when they stopped for fuel…

What goes in must come out, or so the old saying has it.  But when it comes to our nonprofit programs, what, exactly does go in?  This is something worth considering for a moment. Usually, we refer to the things that go into a system as inputs.  They are the things that, through the system’s process, are turned into outputs.  Seems simple enough. If we were making a cake from a box mix, for example, the inputs would be the mix itself, and the oil, eggs, and water the directions call for.  Again, simple. The problem for nonprofit organizations, however, is that in our world things are rarely that simple.  Generally, when asked about program inputs, nonprofit practitioners give answers like, “staff and money.”  While these two considerations are important,…

Sometimes, no matter how long we’ve been thinking about something a certain way, it is necessary to change our perspective.  This realization came to me recently when I had a conversation with the staff of a mid-sized nonprofit up near the Great Lakes. It all began when their director contacted me and said that even though she and her one of her senior managers saw the value in using an outcomes approach in their work, she was having trouble getting the rest of the staff to really buy in.  She asked if I’d join them in a conference call so I could answer some of their questions and help convince the group that this was an idea worth pursuing. In listening to them talk, I was struck by two things:…

The celebration of a New Year is a time for getting back to basics and starting things anew, and so we’re going to use this first column of 2017 to focus on one of the most basic questions concerning outcomes, namely, what is an “outcome”? While this may seem to be a simple question to some, many nonprofit practitioners are not quite sure about the answer…and this is understandable, in part because outcomes have a duel nature. The first thing to recognize is that outcomes are not what we do; they are the things that happen because of what we do. When asked to discuss their organizations’ outcomes, many nonprofit practitioners fall back on the same activity accounts the sector has always used…the number of clients served, the number of…

In 2012 GuideStar and Hope Consulting issued a landmark report on giving.  One of the most important findings was that 71% of individual donors said they wanted information on organizations’ effectiveness.  However, only 33% said they actually did any research before giving, and a minuscule 6% said they compared nonprofits. Recent evidence suggests that this hasn’t changed much.  While people are aware of the fact that they should donate to the causes that have the highest impact, as individuals we’re still giving with primarily with our hearts rather than our heads. Meanwhile, a number of things are going on. Institutional donors like foundations, government, and corporations are still asking for this information; so nonprofits seeking funding are having to provide some account of what they have accomplished. Unfortunately, many are…

GuideStar has announced the coming availability of a new level of participation for nonprofits, something called the Platinum Level.  The intention behind it, the creation of a tool to bust the Overhead Myth, is laudable. For too long, the notion has dogged the sector that anything a charity spends beyond “program expenses,” assumed by most people to be direct benefits for clients, was bad.  This led to numerous artificial and harmful practices as charities contorted themselves, their reporting, and their budgets to appear to spend the overwhelming proportion of their dollars on client benefit.  Somehow, the idea grew that charities neither needed to nor should spend anything on equipment, competitive salaries, training, networking, or the many other things that can contribute to a successful organization. It is notable that GuideStar…

On December 12th I will be presenting at the inaugural session of the Nonprofit Texas Leadership Institutes in Austin, sponsored by the Texas Association of Nonprofit Organizations and the Center for Community-based and Nonprofit Organizations of Austin Community College.  Preparatory to that event, Barry Silverberg, President of TANO, asked me to pen an article for the Institute’s first newsletter.  The following is that article   Why Outcomes? Why should the nonprofit sector change what it has been doing for well over 100 years?   That she was feeling pressured and under a tremendous strain was readily apparent: you could read it in the lines on her face and in her tired, tired eyes.  Not thirty days earlier the county executive had announced the unilateral cancellation of all contracts not deemed…