Nonprofit ROI: The Ultimate Sacrilege?
In an interview with onPhilanthropy, Tom Ralston, the author of the new book ROI for Nonprofits: The New Key to Sustainability, discusses the reaction among the nonprofit community to his premise that “[n]onprofits, like their for-profit counterparts, must … deliver outcomes their investors value”:
As one can imagine, academics and others who study nonprofits, rather than those who actually run them and fund them, consider the investment driven model nonprofit blasphemy. Or at the very least, a bit too capitalistic and too close to a for-profit mentality.
Some experts, who typically run “name brand” nonprofits, disagree because they could easily capitalize on their name and size. They don’t know how tough it is for the small nonprofit (under $1 million budget) to actually raise substantial funding from nongrant sources.
Change can be tough to embrace, of course, and one can only imagine a long-time nonprofit exec wigging out after being told his organization needs to act more corporate. Yet I’m not so sure Ralston is completely correct. My evidence is as anecdotal as his (at least as presented in the interview), but what I sense is an increasing professionalization among nonprofits leading to the kind of conclusions Ralston is writing about. Anyone here read the book yet? If so, I’d be interested in any hard data in it. | 501(c)
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