Nonprofit Metrics: Perhaps Not as Recent a Happening as Many Believe

There’s this notion out there that the nonprofit sector has only recently come around to the idea of metrics and accountability, and I’m just not sure that’s true. For example, the Baltimore Sun, in writing about a company that has developed piece of software that purports to measure nonprofit impact, noted the other day:

It’s a newer way of thinking. Traditionally, nonprofits have been satisfied to know they’re working hard to do good work, but rarely set measures to determine what was good. Individual employees sometimes kept their own records, in logbooks or Excel files or – in one Minnesota organization’s case – on recipe cards. But often, there is no entity-wide system … .

Nonprofit metrics are not long-standing facets of the sector, but neither do I believe that they are as recent a phenomenon as the Sun’s wide-eyed report would have us believe. It’s not as if a Red Cross chapter director in Boise read a management book two years ago and snapped her fingers and launched an accountability movement. Admittedly, I have only my own anecdotal evidence of 15 years in nonprofits to go on, but my gut tells me that, while not nearly as explicitly stated or as formalized as it is now, the attempt to measure results goes back further than many think. | 501(c)