Good nonprofit evaluation reports, grounded in both a qualitative understanding of the nonprofit’s “story” and backed by robust quantitative metrics, is not currently available to the public on anything other than a limited basis. But companies, foundations and nonprofits are working on measuring their impact.
One firm that is helping them is Mission Measurement. I don’t know the company and am not recommending their services. Their managing director, Jason Saul, emailed me to compliment the Giving Carnival debate on evaluating nonprofits.
Mission Measurement’s website is clean and easy to navigate and does a good job of laying out answers to questions like “Why Measure?”. They have a section with case studies that I thought was interesting.
Jason is the author of the book Benchmarking for Nonprofits: How to Manage, Measure and Improve Performance. Mission Measurement also has a blog.
One Comment
Why not email him back and ask him to join the fray? If he does this for a living, I imagine he has something useful to say.