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Mission Impossible?: Measuring Success in Nonprofit Organizations
Abstract
The difficulty of measuring performance in the nonprofit sector has long been recognized. This article begins with a case study detailing how one organization, The Nature Conservancy, tackled the challenge of moving beyond measuring activity to measuring mission impact. After several false starts, the Conservancy developed a model for measuring success, divided into three broad areas: impact, activity, and capacity. The article then presents data from interviews with leaders of thirty other leading nonprofits, who reveal how their organizations measure performance in these three areas. It concludes with some lessons learned about performance measurement in the nonprofit sector.
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Citations
Cited by
Making sense of accountability: Conceptual perspectives for northern and southern nonprofits
Ebrahim, A. (2003) · Nonprofit Management and Leadership · doi:10.1002/nml.29 · Cited by 458
Developing a Conceptual Framework for Comparing Social Value Creation
Kroeger, A., & Weber, C. (2014) · Academy of Management Review · doi:10.5465/amr.2012.0344 · Cited by 371
A Tale of Two Cultures: Charity, Problem Solving, and the Future of Social Entrepreneurship
Dees, J. G. (2012) · Journal of Business Ethics · doi:10.1007/s10551-012-1412-5 · Cited by 355
Toward a Romanian NPOs Sustainability Model: Determinants of Sustainability
Ceptureanu, S.-I., Ceptureanu, E.-G., Orzan, M., & Marin, I. (2017) · Sustainability · doi:10.3390/su9060966 · Cited by 42
Moldavanova, A. V., & Wright, N. S. (2020) · The American Review of Public Administration · doi:10.1177/0275074019884316 · Cited by 22
Metadata
- Authors
- Sawhill, J. C., & Williamson, D.
- Venue
- Nonprofit Management and Leadership
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2001-03
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 371-386
- ISSN
- 1048-6682 (ISSN-L)
- 1542-7854
- OpenAlex
- W1964962946
- Cited by
- 317
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 9.52
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
