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Under-resourced communities are going without because nonprofits can't meet demand. Americans —particularly those in low-income communities—are still struggling to secure jobs, affordable housing, and healthcare. Nonprofit Finance Fund’s 2015 State of the Nonprofit Sector Survey focuses on the underlying causes of these dynamics by exploring the programmatic, financial, and operational issues facing nonprofits across the U.S.
NFF launched the Survey in 2008, when economic crisis threatened the viability of many organizations. Seven years later, results from 5,451 respondents show some indications of recovery, stabilization, and growth. Nonprofits are adding jobs, engaging in strategic conversations such as leadership succession planning, and looking to retain their workforce. Yet as they raise their sights from the focus on short-term crisis, many are confronting the troubling reality that current practices cannot sustain organizations in the long-term or meet the needs of the communities they serve now. Many organizations have stumbled out of crisis looking to make the necessary investments to secure their long-term future. And it is a hard road ahead.
Eastside High School in Paterson sits in the middle of a struggling neighborhood, in a city where 25% of the residents are living below the poverty line, according to the 2020 U.S. Census.
Paterson’s poverty rate is more than twice the state average of 10%, which makes the school, built in 1926, a refuge — and now a resource.
On Thursday, Montclair State University president Jonathan Koppell came to Eastside with a $1 million grant and a vision: to make the school into a community hub, offering free meals, health care, and mental health counseling, not just to the 2,000 students, but to their families as well.
The initiative is called One Square Mile, and it is being seeded with a $1 million grant from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. The program was developed by Koppell during his tenure as Dean of the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions at Arizona State University, which worked with the Phoenix-area community of Maryvale to address poverty.
This piece captures five key insights to guide organizations as they develop ongoing Measurement, Learning, and Evaluation plans to achieve greater social impact:
- Theory of Change amplifies your impact—helping you focus on the linkages between, and assumptions underlying, your strategies and outcomes.
- Progress toward long-term goals is observable in interim measures.
- Setting targets along the way forecasts your trajectory and provides feedback that tells you if you’re moving in the right direction.
- Impactful measurement needs to align with the rhythm of your work and provide the right data at the right times.
- The payoff of measurement is in the practice, and putting that practice to use greatly increases your odds of success.
When confronted with measurement and evaluation, some turn first to the expensive and time-consuming practice of “gold standard” experimental designs requiring comparison groups to definitively prove whether an intervention delivers the expected results. While measurements of this type are reasonable in certain situations, they are often a stretch for the real world of social innovation and are limited in their timeliness, strategic value, cultural applicability, and validity for measuring the changes sought.
You can get more for less—by deploying measurement based on social science rigor and valuing adaptability and learning. In other words, social innovation is best measured in real time and in ways that can be seamlessly woven into the rhythm of the business cycle and the daily practices of those responsible for funding, managing, and implementing social change.
The Grantmaker Salary and Benefits (GSB) Report is the philanthropic sector's leading source of comprehensive data on U.S. foundation staff, helping organizations of all sizes craft budgets, recruit and retain talent, and set personnel policies. The 2024 GSB Report features salary data for 11,380 full-time staff across 1,006 grantmaking organizations. It includes benchmarking data for 38 distinct positions, staff tenure insights such as departure and turnover rates, demographic information, and more.
If you participated in the 2024 Grantmaker Salary and Benefits Survey, you can access the Council on Foundations’ benchmarking tool on Benchmark Central to run salary, benefits, and demographics comparisons by asset size, grants, geographic location, and grantmaker type.
Members of the Council on Foundations can access the report for free; nonmember price is $549.