Nonprofit Performance: Accounting for the Agency of Clients

Performance is a key concern for nonprofits providing human services. Yet our understanding of what drives performance remains incomplete. Existing outcome measurement systems track the programmatic activities staff complete and the extent to which participants respond in programmatically intended ways. However, clients do not just receive services and respond as intended and staff do not simply complete program activities. Drawing on a data set of 47 interviews with frontline staff in eight human service nonprofits, we show how frontline staff work in a partnership with clients to set an agenda for change and achieve desired results. We call this co-determination work and argue that it represents a critical and often neglected dimension of nonprofit performance

From program to network: the evaluator’s role in today’s public problem-solving environment

Today's public policy discussions increasingly focus on how networks of public and private actors collaborate across organizational, sectoral, and geographical boundaries to solve increasingly complex problems. Yet, many of evaluation's key concepts, including the evaluator's role, assume an evaluand that is programmatically or organizationally defined and bounded. This article explores the implications of this changing public policy environment for the evaluator's role by examining one case: an evaluand that was a loose collaboration of four individuals in dispersed organizations working to reframe public policy and to change professional practice in early care and education. We describe this evaluand and the dimensions of it that challenged our evaluative role. We conclude by suggesting an alternative conception of the evaluator's role that can serve evaluators in this changing policy environment

A supramolecular helix that disregards chirality

The functions of complex crystalline systems derived from supramolecular biological and non-biological assemblies typically emerge from homochiral programmed primary structures via first principles involving secondary, tertiary and quaternary structures. In contrast, heterochiral and racemic compounds yield disordered crystals, amorphous solids or liquids. Here, we report the self-assembly of perylene bisimide derivatives in a supramolecular helix that in turn self-organizes in columnar hexagonal crystalline domains regardless of the enantiomeric purity of the perylene bisimide. We show that both homochiral and racemic perylene bisimide compounds, including a mixture of 21 diastereomers that cannot be deracemized at the molecular level, self-organize to form single-handed helical assemblies with identical single-crystal-like order. We propose that this high crystalline order is generated via a cogwheel mechanism that disregards the chirality of the self-assembling building blocks. We anticipate that this mechanism will facilitate access to previously inaccessible complex crystalline systems from racemic and homochiral building blocks

Bottom-Up Organizing with Tools from On High: Understanding the Data Practices of Labor Organizers

This paper provides insight into the use of data tools in the American labor movement by analyzing the practices of staff employed by unions to organize alongside union members. We interviewed 23 field-level staff organizers about how they use data tools to evaluate membership. We find that organizers work around and outside of these tools to develop access to data for union members and calibrate data representations to meet local needs. Organizers mediate between local and central versions of the data, and draw on their contextual knowledge to challenge campaign strategy. We argue that networked data tools can compound field organizers' lack of discretion, making it more difficult for unions to assess and act on the will of union membership. We show how the use of networked data tools can lead to less accurate data, and discuss how bottom-up approaches to data gathering can support more accurate membership assessments

Mediating Accountability: How Nonprofit Funding Intermediaries Use Performance Measurement and Why It Matters for Governance

Performance measurement has become an important tool for ensuring accountability in a governance environment, where addressing public problems often takes place outside the direct purview of government. Although a good deal of attention has been given to government’s use of performance measurement in these settings, either in contracting relationships or interorganizational networks, this paper argues that ensuring accountability in a governance environment requires greater attention to how nonstate actors, or the other principals, use performance measurement. This paper focuses on nonprofit funding intermediaries and their use of performance measurement. Nonprofit funding intermediaries gather funds from a range of public and private donors and regrant these monies to a defined set of local nonprofits. As such, they occupy somewhat unique positions in a web of actors all seeking to solve public problems. We offer a conceptual overview of intermediaries and then critically examine how three nonprofit funding intermediaries used performance measurement

Bearing More Risk for Results: Performance Accountability and Nonprofit Relational Work

Performance accountability systems require nonprofits to bear more risk for achieving results. Although a growing body of work has examined nonprofit accountability, less attention has been given to the concept of risk. This article points to a potential conflict between performance accountability frameworks and nonprofit work. This conflict can be best understood as a one between managing risk in task-driven relationships, in which relationships are formed simply to achieve desirable results, and managing risk in developmentally driven relationships, in which performing a task is intended not only to achieve desirable results but also to build enduring capacity to take action on common problems

The Potential of Outcome Measurement for Strengthening Nonprofits’ Accountability to Beneficiaries

This article considers one mechanism that could create a clearer accountability path between nonprofits and their beneficiaries: Outcome measurement. Outcome measurement focuses attention on a nonprofit’s beneficiaries and whether they are better off as a result of the nonprofit’s work. The article analyzed 10 outcome measurement guides targeted to nonprofits, totaling more than 1,000 pages of text. The analysis shows that the guides were neither uniform in the conceptualization of nonprofit beneficiaries nor in how they directed nonprofits to use outcome measurement with their beneficiaries. Despite scholars’ suggestion that a nonprofit’s relationship to their beneficiaries is a key accountability relationship, the guides suggest that beneficiaries have an ambiguous standing, relative to other stakeholders, in the nonprofit accountability environment

Bringing Beneficiaries More Centrally Into Nonprofit Management Education and Research

In the early 1970s, scholars studying a variety of service organizations realized that beneficiaries were not only external stakeholders who received services but they were also important organizational actors whose participation in the organization affected the organization's structure, functioning, and outcomes. Tracing these early observations, and the related concepts of coproduction, value cocreation, and partial membership, this article considers why these ideas have not been more central to nonprofit education and research. After offering likely explanations, the article reports results from a systematic literature review in three nonprofit journals. The results show that despite the limited attention to these ideas, research findings reveal that beneficiaries are important organizational actors, whose participation in the nonprofit matters for the work of staff, leaders, and ultimately for social impact. The article concludes with suggestions for bringing beneficiaries more centrally into nonprofit management research and education

How Helping Can Reinforce or Attenuate Status Inequalities: The Case of Nonprofit Organizations

This article examines one type of social exchange that signals status: giving and receiving help. I focus on formal helping exchanges between staff and participants in nonprofit organizations. Bringing together status theory with research from social psychology on receiving help and studies of nonprofits, I identify how the helping exchanges in these settings can reinforce or attenuate status hierarchies with important consequences for participants. I examine three attenuation practices (sharing control, establishing commonalities, and questioning causes) and three practices that can reinforce status hierarchies (asserting control, reinforcing differences, and assuming causes) to show how status processes play a powerful but unexamined role in the very places dedicated to addressing inequality