5. Effective nonprofits are more likely to use good management practices.
Several studies support this thesis, including some that show a link between strategic planning and organization effectiveness, but it is a mixed situation. We recently found that only board members’ assessment of organizational effectiveness was related to increased use of good management practices; neither funders’ nor senior managers’ assessments were related to increased use of good management practices. This leads us to be suspicious of the recent trend to identify “best practices” for NPOs.6. The promise of “best practices” should be viewed with skepticism.
The concept of “best practices” has become something of a holy grail for those seeking to enhance NPO effectiveness, yet our work has found no legitimate basis to claim that particular practices are automatically best or even good. We prefer to talk in terms of “promising practices” to describe approaches that warrant consideration because, at best, one may claim only that they are worth consideration and must be judged in the context of the specific organization.7. The concept of responsiveness may offer a solution to the problem of differing judgments of effectiveness by different stakeholder groups.
In spite of the fact that different stakeholder groups differed in their ratings of effectiveness for an organization, we have found, for all stakeholder groups, that the factor of responsiveness was positively linked to judgments of NPO effectiveness.8. Since many NPOs operate as part of a network of service delivery, we need to start thinking more in terms of network effectiveness.
When an NPO operates as part of a larger network to deliver services, it is less relevant to assess individual NPO effectiveness than that of the entire set of organizations working together. Emphasis on the effectiveness of such NPOs as though separate and distinct can lead an observer to invalid conclusions.
No comments:
Post a Comment