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Johns Hopkins report on non-profit innovation has been launched
24 May 2010
Euclid has been pushing for increasing innovation and effectiveness in the third sector from a long time. Apparently, we are going in the right direction and on the other side of the Atlantic, things are changing in the same direction.
The confirmation comes from a new Johns Hopkins University survey. The study has revealed widespread innovation among the US non-profit organizations, as well as efforts to measure their programs’ effectiveness. The vast majority (82 percent) of responding organizations reported implementing an innovative program or service within the past five years, and 85 percent reported measuring program effectiveness.
The study
The study surveyed a nationwide sample of non-profit organizations in four key fields – children and family services, elderly housing and services, community and economic development, and the arts – with 417 organizations responding. It defined an “innovative” program or service as “a new or different way to address a societal problem or pursue a charitable mission that is more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just than prevailing approaches.”
Substantial majorities of organizations in all four fields covered by the survey reported innovative activity during the previous five years, and this was particularly pronounced among larger organizations. Although innovation is widespread within the non-profit sector, more than two-thirds of responding organizations also reported having at least one innovation in the past two years that they wanted to adopt but were unable to. The inability to adopt a proposed innovation was mainly due to a lack of funding. Other key barriers included the inability to move promising innovations to scale due to lack of “growth capital” (74 percent), narrow governmental funding streams (70 percent), and a tendency among foundations to encourage innovations but then not sustain support for them (69 percent).
As for performance measurement, the great majority of nonprofits reported positive impact from measuring the effectiveness of their programs. These impacts included staying focused on long-term goals (72 percent), enhancing their reputation in the community (68 percent), and improving their services (68 percent). On the other side, the major barriers to more extensive use of performance measurements identified by respondents were a lack of staff time and expertise, and the cost of good evaluation.
Recommendations for the sector
Recommendations from survey respondents for helping to overcome the remaining barriers to non-profit innovation and performance measurement included better tools to measure qualitative impacts (82 percent of respondents), less time-consuming measurement tools (81 percent), financial resources to support the measurement and research functions (79 percent), greater help from intermediary organizations in fashioning common evaluation tools (67 percent), and training for personnel in how to use these tools (63 percent).
The full report “Nonprofits, Innovation and Performance Measurement: Separating Fact from Fiction” is available online at http://ccss.jhu.edu .