Surprising New Research on High-Impact Nonprofits
Well-managed organizations achieve the most impact, right? Not so, according to research summarized in the new book in a recent article from Stanford Social Innovation Review and Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits. Among the myths found when analyzing the performance of leading lights like Teach for America and Habitat for Humanity:
Achieving high impact is not just about building a great organization and then scaling it up site by site, or dollar by dollar. As we got further into our research, we saw that many commonly held beliefs about what makes nonprofits successful were falling by the wayside. In fact, the vast majority of nonprofit literature focuses on issues that, although important, don’t determine whether an organization has impact, such as:
Myth #1: Perfect Management. Some of the organizations we studied are not exemplary models of generally accepted management principles. Although adequate management is necessary, it is not sufficient for creating significant social impact.
Myth #2: Brand-Name Awareness. A handful of groups we studied are household names, but a few hardly focus on marketing at all. For some, traditional mass marketing is a critical part of their impact strategy; for others, it’s unimportant.
Myth #3: A Breakthrough New Idea. Although some groups come up with radical innovations, others take old ideas and tweak them until they achieve success.
Myth #4: Textbook Mission Statements. All of these nonprofits look to compelling missions, visions, and shared values. But only a few of these groups spend time fine-tuning their mission statement on paper; most of them are too busy living it.
Myth #5: High Ratings on Conventional Metrics.When we looked at traditional measures of nonprofit efficiency, many of these groups didn’t score well, because they don’t adhere to misleading metrics such as overhead ratios.
Myth #6: Large Budgets.We discovered that size doesn’t correlate with impact. Some of these nonprofits have made a big impact with large budgets; others have achieved similar impact with much smaller budgets. As we dismissed the conventional wisdom about what makes high-impact nonprofits successful, we realized we had discovered a new way of understanding this sector - and what enables the best nonprofits to create lasting social change.
Posted at 1:24 AM, Feb 11, 2008 in Permalink | Comment