Nonprofit Outcome Measurement

With the nonprofit sector expanding rapidly and increasingly gaining in social as well as economic significance, the measurement of organizational effectiveness in the absence of easily quantifiable objectives, most notably those of financial character, emerges as one of the major challenges of nonprofit management. In the quest for practices of performance evaluation that adequately emphasize these organizations' predominantly qualitative goals, attention has recently shifted away from output-based monitoring towards the examination of outcomes. Outcome measurement (OM) is a method that seeks to turn the focus from activities to results, determining the degree to which nonprofits succeed in accomplishing their core mission by assessing their programs' favorable impact on the participants' quality of life. The author Nina Sauerland describes the current state of existent OM theory before outlining practical OM techniques. Building on her findings, she analyses the practical operability of OM for nonprofits and, based on previously introduced theoretical frameworks for accountability and program improvement in nonprofit organizations, systematically evaluates its applicability for such purposes. Her book is aimed at nonprofit professionals as well as scholars of nonprofit management.