Shifting the ways we measure and account for “success” in the nonprofit sector
A number of promising changes are underway in the non-profit and charitable sectors and in their relationships with partners and communities. However, the sector’s accountability relationships and how it defines and accounts for “success” still need to be rethought to remove sources of distortion and noise.
This week I published an article in the Philanthropist Journal that asks the question:
What if we had an ecosystem instead that truly valued experimentation and adaptation over reporting prescribed “success,” that valued capturing, distilling, and sharing authentic learnings? What if we had an ecosystem that included all affected stakeholders in defining and assessing what counts as success and that supported accountability to all of these stakeholders?
In recent years, social purpose organizations and their allies have led the charge in re-envisioning this ecosystem and in redefining the terms by which their success should be measured. Some initiatives that have worked towards this:
Ontario Nonprofit Network’s Sector Driven Evaluation Strategy;
Territoires innovants en économie sociale et solidaire’s impact measurement initiative and the Montreal Declaration;
The Common Approach to Impact Measurement initiative.
I argue that foundations also have a critical role to play shifting the accountability relationship and in fostering these new practices. To be sure, philanthropy is only one part of a resourcing landscape that also includes government funders and, increasingly, investors.
One way to think about the current and potential role of foundations in the evaluation and reporting ecosystem is through the lens of their accountabilities. Elsewhere, I have explored how I believe that an implicit “social compact” requires foundations to properly account for the contributions that they are making to positive social change through their programs and funding – in other words, their outcomes and impact.
But in thinking about outcomes and impact, foundations have very often shifted the burden of accountability onto grantees, as Tanya Beer and her colleagues remind us in their excellent article “Holding Foundations Accountable for Equity Commitments”.
In the space of just a couple of years, fundamental changes appear to be underway in the philanthropic sector, and the conversation about trust-based philanthropy – that centres the accountability relationship that foundations have with the partners and communities that they work with -- has rapidly come to dominate discourse.
What would it take for foundations to attend to community relationships and outcomes while also assessing and accounting for the outcomes of their own actions? I share some thoughts in the article about what an evaluation and learning ecosystem could look like that brings together these accountabilities.