For many years, foundations and nonprofits have deliberately been on a path toward greater organizational effectiveness. Two noted commentators have in recent weeks suggested that the current approach has an unintentional but fatal flaw: It hurts nonprofits dedicated to promoting social justice and equity — especially those that work on the toughest but potentially most important problems.
The first critique came in the Huffington Post from Kathleen Enright, chief executive of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. She noted that philanthropy has “advanced ideas about effectiveness that have unwittingly perpetuated or even exacerbated inequity in the nonprofit sector.”
Endorsing her argument, Vu Le, a nonprofit commentator and executive director at Rainier Valley Corps, took it further on his widely read blog in a post titled “How the Concept of Effectiveness Has Screwed Nonprofits and the People We Serve.”
In it he argued, “Our sector’s current concept of effectiveness is simplistic, shortsighted, and ignores the values and perspectives of communities most affected by the issues we are working to solve.” He suggests a more holistic approach from philanthropy is needed, including elevating the voices of “the people most affected by injustice.”
Enright and Le are right. Philanthropy is no less subject to the corrosive effects of implicit bias and systematic exclusion than any other endeavor. Yes, we have failed in this respect, and we must do better. Philanthropy can and should focus on important problems of the day, including forms of inequity involving race, class, religion, disability, gender, and sexual orientation.
And it must do a much better job of putting front and center the voices, preferences, and insights of the people and communities that philanthropy seeks to benefit.
But Enright and Le both paint the prevailing concept of nonprofit effectiveness with too broad a brush. They make generalizations that can easily lead to the wrong conclusions, like discarding in a wholesale way existing frameworks for effectiveness. Instead, we propose building on the good work on nonprofit effectiveness that has taken shape over the last couple of decades and integrate elements of equity, diversity, and inclusion into those frameworks.
The Role of Measurement
Measurement plays a vital role in effectiveness, so it would be a mistake to throw away measurement as a tool of the white, privileged establishment.
Geoffrey Canada often tells a story about his early days in starting the Harlem Children’s Zone that makes this point well. Canada has always been a big believer in data to help achieve the mission of providing the children of Harlem with the support needed to become productive, self-sustaining adults.
At one point, a director at the Harlem Children’s Zone was upset that data showed a particular program’s efforts were having little effect. Canada told the director, “Don’t get angry about the data. The data tell you an important story. We can’t fall in love with our programs. We have to fall in love with our missions. And data is a tool to pursue our mission and adjust along the way.”
We agree with Canada. Good measurement is sensitive to its purpose. It is a dispassionate tool for serving passionate ends.
For the last six years, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and other grant makers have invested in PropelNext, an effort designed to help nonprofits transform their passion for aiding needy youngsters into data-driven insights and practices that produce stronger results.
Most participating organizations are community-based nonprofits with budgets of $5 million or less. They have diverse leadership teams and are confronting some of the most critical challenges facing young people.
Through a three-year program of grants, consulting resources, and a peer network of support, organizations examine their program models and determine how best to assess their services, learn from their measurement, and make a long-term commitment to learning and improvement. We know from our external evaluation that most of these organizations, over time, deliver stronger programs, serve more youths, and gain access to new grants and other sources of financial support.
Nonprofits and communities should help define the measures of success — including feedback from beneficiaries. But let’s continue to use other common measures as well.
Just as measures of individual health and well-being such as blood pressure and cholesterol help us understand overall health, we need to make sure we also have some common ground in understanding how best to track individual, community, and organizational progress and to move our efforts where disparities remain.
Vu Le suggests that we should be paying more attention to what community members say they want from nonprofits and measure those indicators, not what foundation executives think is important. Le asks, “What if community members say they are seeking happiness? Is that a valid measure?”
We would say yes! And approach that inquiry with the seriousness and discipline that such an ambition requires. There may be value in combining a measure of experience with other outcome measures. That is our point. Be expansive, inclusive, and purpose-driven in measurement.
Promote Meaningful Connections
Bryan Stevenson, head of the Equal Justice Initiative, often suggests that it is important for grant makers to be “more proximate” to those they hope will benefit from their money.
We are both involved in the Fund for Shared Insight, a four-year-old grant-making collaborative that is committed to finding meaningful ways for foundations and nonprofits to connect with each other and the people and communities they seek to help and to be more responsive to their feedback.
Through its Listen for Good project, the fund is supporting nonprofits that regularly solicit feedback from the people they serve. Nonprofits engaged in Listen for Good explore simple but rigorous ways to obtain feedback from their program participants on their experiences, preferences, and ideas for improvement. About 170 nonprofits and 78 grant makers are participating in this effort to more deeply and systematically listen to the perspectives of the communities and people they seek to help, especially those whose voices are least heard, with the aspiration that people are better off in ways they define for themselves.
We know there is a long way to go, but we are heartened by the early results of this venture. Organizations involved in Listen for Good are wrestling with the feedback they are getting, which sometimes challenges basic assumptions about their work or approach. Other organizations, like Feedback Labs, which helps nonprofits reach out to those they serve, are calling the demand for more voices from beneficiaries not just a practice but a movement, taking place domestically as well as globally.
Giving Compass, an organization that helps donors learn about philanthropy, identified the growth of constituent and community feedback — especially now that technology makes it so much easier — as a key positive innovation for 2018.
And the Leap Ambassadors network, the brainchild of Mario Morino, has recently expanded its impressive Performance Imperative framework to include listening and responding to feedback as a component of nonprofit effectiveness.
For sure, listening and feedback need to play a more prominent part in our thinking about what makes a nonprofit or foundation effective. A recent scan by the Hewlett Foundation found more than 90 nonprofit effectiveness tools, and very few included this dimension. We need to do better.
However, these are all signs that philanthropy is poised to embrace a more expansive notion of nonprofit effectiveness, one that is more serious and committed to listening and responding.
Build Healthy and Resilient Organizations
We take Enright’s point that assessments of strong management are subjective and can look different depending on where an organization operates and what its mission is. Of course. Grant makers should go the extra mile to understand how different contexts affect thinking about effectiveness — and invest in building management and leadership capacity that work in each context.
But not all common definitions of management or leadership are useless or should be discarded. To the contrary. We need a more expansive understanding of how effective leadership, management, and governance might find expression in different settings.
As we are all working in a hyperpolarized world, let’s construct a better, more meaningfully connected nonprofit world that builds upon the good work of others.
As Maya Angelou once said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.”
Let’s refine and expand our notions of nonprofit effectiveness to be more inclusive, more nuanced, and more helpful to more actors. Science and evidence are not in opposition to, or incompatible with, equity. In fact, blending evidence and equity, listening and learning, feedback and flexibility may offer the best path forward for a more just society, with more opportunity and happiness for all.
Lissette Rodriguez is vice president and chief program officer at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. Fay Twersky is program director of the effective philanthropy group at the William and Flora Family Foundation.