Nonprofit Performance Management: Using Data to Measure and Improve Programs

Tracking and measuring data can give nonprofits a better understanding of the populations they serve and how they serve them. It can also help them identify areas they can improve to boost the reach and effectiveness of their programs. But many organizations struggle with the idea of using data.How do successful nonprofits go about the process of implementing their data practices? What software do they use? What are the obstacles they face, and how do they overcome them? To find out, we reached out to our network of experts and consultants for examples of organizations that were successfully using data to improve and direct their work, and narrowed their list of recommendations down to 10 nonprofits of different sizes, missions, and locations.We talked to staffers at each who were involved with data and analyzed the information we gathered for common themes, best practices, and any patterns that might be useful. We also asked them for advice for other organizations looking to replicate their successes and learn from their mistakes.From those 10 organizations, we chose seven for case studies about the different ways they were using data. This report is built around those case studies and the additional conversations we had

The Landscape of Salesforce for Nonprofits: A Report on the Current Marketplace for Apps

Do you use Salesforce as a Constituent Relationship Management database at your organization, or are you considering it? Since it launched in 1999, more than 20,000 nonprofits have employed the cloud-based system, which is made available to them for free through the philanthropic Salesforce Foundation. What's the catch? Making such a powerful system work for the particular needs of a nonprofit isn't always straightforward. This report can tell you everything you need to know.What's in it? To learn more about the benefits and drawbacks of Salesforce, we interviewed nine prominent consultants specializing in implementing Salesforce for nonprofits along with several members of the Salesforce.com Foundation about what the platform does well, and what you'll want to add to it to suit your needs. We evaluated some of the constituent management packages built on top of Salesforce, including the Salesforce Foundation's Nonprofit Starter Pack, which is aimed at turning the sales automation platform into a tool for nonprofits. We also took a look at the universe of add-ons to the base Salesforce platform -- called "apps" because of Salesforce's online marketplace, the App Exchange -- to find out which might be useful to support a nonprofit's processes.The goal for this report was to break down misconceptions about the tool and to collect disparate information in one place to help you make informed decisions. Whether you're already using Salesforce, are thinking about adopting it, or have yet to even consider it, there's information here for you.What's more, we've included a directory of consultants or firms with experience working with nonprofits to implement Salesforce and the additional App Exchange modules that we cover in this report to make it easier for you to find the help you'll need

A Consumers Guide to Software for Volunteer Management

Volunteer-based organizations have to keep track of a lot of data—for example, contact info, schedules, time sheets and job sites—and the right software can help, freeing time for managing volunteers. There are a number of products out there, but it's surprisingly hard to find information about them.We hope this report remedies that. We designed it to serve as an introduction to volunteer management software: what's out there, what to expect and how the different solutions compare

Streamlining Online Grant Applications: A Review of Vendors

In this report different vendors are evaluated against Project Streamline's Essential and Gold Standard features for online applications and reporting

The influence of work time adjustment on joint activities and the demand for child care

In this paper we examine if partners in households coordinate their working times. Also we examine how this coordination influences the (in)formal demand for child care and the time spent on joint activities. The activities that we distinguish are the time that partners spent together, spent jointly on household tasks and spent jointly on child care. We find that partners de-synchronize their work times when there are children present in the household while they synchronize their work times when there are no children present in the household. Households where women are higher educated tend to synchronize there work times. Partners who synchronize their work times spent more joint hours on household tasks. Partners who de-synchronize their work times less spent more time together. We do not find a relation between work timing and the time that parents spent together caring for their children. The demand for (in)formal child care is affected by the coordination of work schedules by partners. Partners who de-synchronize their work times more, demand less (in)formal child care. Moreover, active work time desynchronization and the demand for child care appear to be substitutes.Time Allocation; Work Timing; Work Hours; Leisure Time

Exotic hadronic states and all-to-all quark propagators

We discuss methods to obtain accurate hadronic spectra with propagating quarks. Comparing the determination of masses for spin-exotic hybrid mesons with glueball mass determinations, we conclude that quark propagators from all sites to all other sites would enable great improvement in the errors. Such propagators are achievable by using stochastic estimators. We discuss previous attempts and present our method for maximal variance reduction. This is a very promising technique and we illustrate it by obtaining the spectrum of ground state and excited B mesons in the limit where the $b$ quark is static.Comment: 6 pages, LATEX, 2 postscript figures, needs espcrc2.st

Prognostics Factors of Cochlear Implant in Adults: How Can We Improve Poorer Performers?

Rehabilitation for any cochlear implant (CI) recipient is a process having the aim of taking the necessary steps to enable users to achieve their best possible auditory outcome. It involves all stages of interaction including evaluations for candidacy, device selection, preoperative counseling, surgical intervention, device activation, post-implant support, evaluations of progress, and hearing training. Since rehabilitation is an ongoing process, it becomes critical to determine what is sufficient, that is, how intense the follow-up program must be, especially since there is substantial variability for results on outcome measures that assess progress in hearing function and abilities after implantation

Intra-Household Work Timing: The Effect on Joint Activities and the Demand for Child Care

This study examines if couples time their work hours and how this work timing influences child care demand and the time that spouses jointly spend on leisure, household chores and child care. By using a innovative matching strategy, this studies identifies the timing of work hours that cannot be explained by factors other than the partners’ potential to communicate on the timing of their work. The main findings are that couples with children create less overlap in their work times and this effect is more pronounced the younger the children. We find evidence for a togetherness preference of spouses, but only for childless couples. Work timing also influences the joint time that is spent on household chores, but the effect is small. Finally, work timing behavior affects the demand for informal child care, but not the demand for formal child care.labor supply, work timing, time allocation

Collective Labor Supply of Native Dutch and Immigrant Households in the Netherlands

We estimate a collective time allocation model, where Dutch, Surinamese/Antillean and Turkish households behave as if both spouses maximize a household utility function. We assume that paid labor and housework are the endogenous choice variables and furthermore consider household production. Surinamese/Antillean and Turkish women differ from Dutch women because they value (joint) household production more in their utility function. Surinamese/Antillean and Turkish men, on the other hand, value joint household production less then Dutch men. Turkish households are the more traditional households, in the sense that the woman is more oriented on household production, while the man is oriented on paid labor. It is often believed that the bargaining power of women in more traditional households is relatively low, but our estimation results do not support this idea. In general, the wage elasticities of Dutch, Turkish and Surinamese/Antillean households are comparable. Men and women replace housework hours by paid labor if their hourly wage rate increases but do the opposite when the hourly wage rate of the partner increases.collective model, labor supply, child care