There is a great deal of talk about the accountability of nonprofits. It’s on the tip of everyone’s tongue and discussed at conferences and seminars and in board rooms. It has become a punch line of sorts and frankly is in danger of becoming a meaningless word similar to the all natural tag lines you see on just about every food product sold.Terms like accountability, transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness are being over-used and continue to be ill-defined. One problem is we all seem to define them differently. Being efficient to one nonprofit might be totally ineffective to another. In other words the bar is higher for some than for others.
But, a potential flaw in the way accountability is being approached has to do with what we are trying to be accountable for and to whom.
Like Jack Nicholson testified in A Few Good Men – “you can’t handle the truth!” And in many ways, we really can’t handle the truth – the truth of the matter is that for many reasons (some legitimate and some not so legitimate) many nonprofits are not conducting efficient businesses. Consequently a great deal of the money being donated to a given charity doesn’t reach the people or cause the donor intended it to reach.
In a recent post I mentioned my displeasure with the news about the IRS attempting to “regulate” a nonprofits effectiveness and efficiency. I pointed out how ironic it is to consider the government being skilled in effectiveness, let alone efficiency. But the more I consider this topic the more I realize we there is a flaw in the conventional thinking – and in some ways it’s a very big flaw in our approach to this topic.
The flaw is this: we are busy evaluating financial efficiency and effectiveness and making attempts to appear transparent and accountable and we have led ourselves to believe that all we need to do is do a better job explaining the way we allocate funds; or display our financials in a more reader-friendly format at the website; or post our 990′s and annual reports in downloadable formats; or develop internal cost saving measures; and so on.
BUT the big thing we seem to be missing is being accountable to our mission and evaluating our effectiveness at fulfilling that mission.
Shouldn’t we truly be measured by how we fulfill our mission??
If we say we are going to build 100 water wells we better build 100 water wells and nothing less. We should do what we say we are going to do.
A nonprofit can look good on paper and have a stellar Charity Navigator report and even carry the BBB seal but may be totally inept at fulfilling its mission. Some of the most revered charities in history look good on paper, have had incredible brand recognition, a perceived aura of honesty and accountability – but as we all know looks can be deceiving.
You hit the nail on the head with this one Eric!! Financial accountability is important as is transparency BUT where is the accountability in programatic success. THese measures of success need to be more that output measues (we registered 100 more boy scouts this year over last). That is all dine and dandy but what social impact did that have. so, I would go evenfurther in your “water well” analogy. I would sayx if 100 water wells were to be built then yes 100 should have been built AND they should have been providing NEEDED safe drinking water to X number of people, enabled the growth of crops that yielded X amont of food, etc, etc.