Nonprofits Are Being Required to Provide Hard Facts to Get Funding
August 10, 2009 By Margaret Bernstein
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Ken Berger, head of Charity Navigator, said it will take at least a year to implement the change. He estimated only 10 percent of the rated charities measure outcomes.
Robert Egger, founder of a Washington, D.C., nonprofit and another alliance member, said that in cash-strapped states like Ohio, it's vital that government agencies stop throwing money at organizations that aren't accomplishing social change.
Cleveland's United Way saw the trend coming and held workshops to prepare nonprofits for the data-driven age.
Judy Simpson, who led those workshops in 1999 and today is United Way's vice president for community investment, said organizations have no choice but to hire or assign a staffer to manage client data.
Some local nonprofits, like Big Brothers Big Sisters, get help from a national office, giving them access to a larger data pool and a framework for local data collection.
But at low-budget and grass-roots nonprofits, it's a struggle to satisfy the new demands.
Joy Banish, executive director at Greater Cleveland Volunteers, said her agency (the former RSVP of Greater Cleveland) can produce pages of charts and tables to illustrate accomplishments. Yet her staff is stretched thin because each funder seems to ask for a different slice of data.
Yet nonprofits say they're learning more about their operations as the research rolls in. At Big Brothers Big Sisters, for example, surveying "bigs" and "littles" in short-lived relationships helped staffers identify what went wrong. "Our program is better as a result of the studies," said Mitchell.
But funding can be fickle, even for those who tenaciously gather the information.
In Lorain County, the First Step job-preparation program had statistics to show that between 2004 and 2009, it transformed half of its 308 graduates into wage-earners and saved the state more than $800,000 in cash and food stamp benefits.
The program was praised by the county's Job and Family Services Department for accomplishing a lot on a $140,000 annual budget. Still, the agency lost its funding June 30, a victim of state budget cutbacks.
Executive Director Rick Grahovac of Common Ground, the nonprofit that created First Step to help people with serious life challenges, said he's disappointed that the high-achieving program has been suspended. "I really felt it made a difference and had a big impact," he said.
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