Anytime we do things for the “wrong” reasons, there’s a good chance that experience will be less fulfilling, less meaningful, and less useful than if we’d done it for the “right” reasons. The same is true of evaluation. When we do it because someone tells us to (funder, donor, accreditor) and not because we want[…]
I’ve said it here many times. I hate waste! As a sector that’s starved for resources yet charged with addressing some of society’s most intractable problems, we can’t afford to waste any time, energy, knowledge, or money! We’ve all heard the saying “time is money.” In our sector, time is money, and money is the[…]
People in both for-profit and not-for-profit sectors often opine about the differences between the two. In the non-profit world, we say we are different because we are motivated by mission rather than money. The business world sometimes says we should be more like businesses. I agree with both, to some degree. Because our organizations are[…]
For years, I’ve had an image in my head that represented the results of nonprofits’ often piecemeal, reactive efforts to respond to stakeholder demands and ill-fitting funding opportunities. It can be a patched together, mismatched, less-than-functional mishmash of unclear intentions and unfocused efforts. In my research, I came across a term in home remodeling: subtraction[…]
In my last post, I offered a basic definition of organizational culture: the system of shared beliefs, values, and assumptions that govern the way people behave in organizations. Culture shapes how we communicate, make decisions, reward and incentivize certain behaviors, solve problems, make change, set direction, and on and on. Culture can Kill Change In[…]
A few months ago, I was inspired by an article I read from Inc. magazine, entitled “The One Position Not Many Companies Have, But Need” by Tom Gimbel. He asserts that leaders of growing companies – and, I would argue, nonprofits – lose touch with the ins-and-outs of daily operations and how the organization functions.[…]
In my last post, I argued that for continuous quality improvement work in nonprofits to be meaningful and make significant impacts on an organization, it must be: Intrinsically motivated Guided by our own definitions of quality Directed toward goals and driven to change Integrated, not siloed Applied and iterated In this post, I want to[…]
In my last post, I introduced a widely accepted definition of quality – meeting or exceeding customer expectations – and how a narrow (and uninspired) interpretation and application of that definition in the nonprofit sector has led to a focus on compliance rather than improvement. Rather than defining high quality service for ourselves, nonprofits define[…]
Why Should You Care about Quality Improvement? There is no shortage of well-meaning business leaders, public officials, and bloggers who think they’ve diagnosed what’s “wrong” with the nonprofit sector. Nonprofits are inefficient or poorly managed. Nonprofits need to think and act like businesses. Nonprofits aren’t innovative. I don’t get offended by or hung up on[…]