Judging the PERFORMANCE of Institutions of Higher Education

There is a very interesting column in today’s NYTIMES about the lack of academic standards in higher education.  Entitled “Who will Hold Colleges Accountable?” it is written by Kevin Carey and can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/opinion/who-will-hold-colleges-accountable.html?hp

It starts with an anecdote about how athletes at major football colleges are obtaining credit hours at on-line institutions by taking “gut” courses to remain eligible for varsity competition at their “home” institution while really not learning anything.   (This practice was first exposed in last month’s edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

The author uses this story as a jumping off point to criticize the lack of uniform performance measurements in higher education and states that “the notion of recording academic progress by counting the number of hours students spend sitting in a classroom [credit hours] is nonsensical.”   He goes on to assert “the most promising solution would be to replace the anachronistic credit hour with common standards for what college students actually need to know and to be able to do.”

As a professor, I’ve always been a little skittish about creating a long list of common standards that can clog up a curriculum with mandated readings.  I like the intellectual freedom that I currently have to present students with a host of competing ideas and intellectual frameworks.  I then challenge them to think critically and to decide which set of tools and possible action steps will be most effective in any particular situation. 

But as a program director, I understand the usefulness of broad academic benchmarks for comparing the depth, breadth, and quality of different nonprofit masters programs.  This is why we applied for and received certification of our nonprofit profit programs from the Nonprofit Academic Center Council (NACC).   Unlike many other nonprofit programs that are appendages of business, public policy, and/or social work schools, all the topics identified by NACC as being critical to quality nonprofit training are found in the core curriculum of Bay Path’s nonprofit programs.  You can see the rigor and thoroughness of our programs by looking at our course descriptions on this website.   Thoughts?

Jeff 

Thoughts About Recent ARNOVA Conference

Jeff Greim

I sometimes ask my students whether their nonprofit functions like a “day laborer” or like an  “entrepreneur.”  This question is meant to highlight the differences between a nonprofit that is contracted by funders to operate very prescribed program models, and a nonprofit that has the financial independence to creatively identify and address unmet needs in their local community without first obtaining  financial approval from a funder.   


This distinction came into sharp relief while I attended this year’s ARNOVA conference held in Indianapolis on November 15-17.  As I listened to many paper presentations, two seemingly competing themes emerged.  One theme emphasized the need for nonprofits to do a better job providing funders with valid performance measurements to demonstrate the effectiveness of their services.   The underlying assumption was that nonprofits--in order to obtain and retain funding--had to demonstrate their worthiness by excelling in funder-specified program and performance measurements.  This theme reflects a top-down management perspective.   

A second theme reflected a “bottom-up” perspective.    It emphasized the importance and benefits of nonprofits being responsive to community-identified needs and to be supportive of creative solutions developed organically in collaboration with community members.

As I thought about these two seemingly contradictory perspectives, I recalled a third theme that my students and I developed during a recent Capstone Course at Bay Path College and that draws on the writings of Chambers & Wedel and Elizabeth Schorr. This theme states that while a majority of people can normally be served adequately using a “one-size-fits-all” service model, there will always be a certain percentage of “outliers” who can only be helped using idiosyncratic methods that take into account their unique circumstances.   In our class, we visualized this theme as a bell curve distribution of service recipients with a majority of them grouped under the middle of the curve (and adequately served by standardized program models) and a minority of recipients located under the two-tails of the distribution requiring flexible, client specific services. 

This third theme suggests that the merit of a top-down or bottom-up perspective is contingent upon the service needs of the target population.  If the nonprofit’s target population is the majority of people who can be served by a standardized service model, then an emphasis on providing those prescribed services efficiently, effectively and economically—as measured by valid performance measurements—would seem very appropriate.  On the other hand, if the nonprofit’s target population is the “outlier”—those requiring unique services--then the nonprofit really has to be flexible in its development and provision of those services and not be artificially constrained by the “canned” protocols of standardized service models and/or performance measurements.    Thoughts?

2012 ARNOVA CONFERENCE - 2013's conference will be in Hartford!

Hi,

As I write this, I am sitting in the Charlotte Airport on my way home from the 2012 ARNOVA annual conference that was held in Indianapolis.   I arrived on Wednesday afternoon and its now Saturday evening.  The conference is a jam-packed kaleidoscope of “all things nonprofit” including though-provoking paper presentations, association meetings, colloquiums, and many side-bar conversations among the 800 or so attendees.  To give you a sense of the depth and breadth of topics discussed, there were complete “session tracks” in the following areas:

1)      Boards, Governance & Accountability;

2)      Collaborations & Networks;

3)      Community & Grassroots Organizations / Secular & Faith-based;

4)      Effectiveness, Evaluation & Programs;

5)      Fundraising & Giving;

6)      Innovations & Entrepreneurship;

7)      Management, Leadership & Strategies; 

8)      Public Policy & Law;

9)      Teaching & Education;

10)   Theory & Methods;

11)   Volunteerism & Volunteering; and 

12)   The Conference Track:  Re-Examining Philanthropy. 

In all, there were 170 separate sessions.  I wanted to attend many more than was physically possible and all the sessions I attended were very good.  

I'll write some polished thoughts about the conference on a later blog.  But for now, I just want to share that the conference is a wonderful professional development opportunity that you should not miss if you ever have the opportunity to attend.   And that brings me to the real point of this blog.

 

ARNOVA’s Annual Conference next year will be in held on November 21-23 in Hartford, CT – in Bay Path College’s backyard.  So if you are within driving distance of Hartford, I strongly encourage you (and your staff) to participate in next year’s conference as a presenter and/or attendee and start planning now to do so.  The call for papers normally occurs in the early spring.  I’m a member of the Host-Site Committee and will share updates on next year’s conference as plan are finalized.  If you have any questions about the conference, contact me or go to ARNOVA’s website.  OK? 

Jeff 

Hi, 

In the post-election "reflections" sweeping the media, one person getting a lot of attention is Karl Rove, the organizer of the SUPER PAC "Crossroads" and its "sister" 501c4 "Crossroads GPS".  Below is a link to a front page article in yesterday's NYTIMES.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/us/politics/little-to-show-for-cash-flood-by-big-donors.html?pagewanted=all

The gist of these media "stories/articles" seems to be that Rove is on the "hot seat" because he raised and spent somewhere between $340 - $390 million dollars on campaign ads and seems to have nothing to show for it.  Apparently none of the candidates his organizations supported got elected.  

So the discussion is focusing on whether all this money flowing into the campaign process (due to the Supreme Court's Citizen United decision) can actually influence elections, or was Rove incompetent, or was he just backing a "bad" product.  Interestingly, I’m not hearing a corresponding evaluation of the effectiveness of Rove's "opposition", the millions of dollars in pro-OBAMA campaign ads.

Unfortunately, this discussion misses the real point.  In previous blogs and two presentations I've made this fall, I've argued that using 501c4s as PACs is particularly damaging to our democracy and to the reputation of the nonprofit sector because the 501c4s are funneling undisclosed money into political campaigns.  From my partisan perspective, "the bad" 501c4s didn't "win" on Tuesday and that is "good."  But as Robert Reich, former US Labor Secretary, said on MSNBC last night, this is only the beginning.  As long as the 501c4 option is available, very wealthy people will secretly pour more and more money into political campaigns and--regardless of the election outcome--this will not be good for our democracy or the reputation of the nonprofit sector. 

Thoughts?  

Jeff  

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/us/politics/little-to-show-for-cash-flood-by-big-donors.html?pagewanted=all

Students Excel in Recent CAPSTONE RESEARCH PAPERS.

During the past two weeks a number of NMP and SFP students have been finishing up their final coursework and presenting their CAPSTONE RESEARCH PAPERS to faculty and classmates.  The topic of the these 30–page papers are chosen by students and the papers give them the opportunity to explore further a nonprofit topic covered in their coursework, or a topic related to their career advancement.  

This “crop” of papers including the following interesting topics:

*   “Best Practices” for using YouTube videos in nonprofit social media campaigns;
*   Improving one’s managerial effectiveness by using the profiles of different “generations” to anticipate how employees of different ages will perform in various work environments and how they will respond to different types and levels of supervision; 
*   Making the tax-deductibility of donations to a particular “house of worship” contingent upon that “house of worship” submitting a form 990 to the IRS;
*   Evaluating common practices among student phonathon programs; and An examination of how measurement can assist in achieving an optimal fund development strategy.

If you are particularly interested in reading any of these papers, please let me know.  I’ll speak to the author and try to have them posted on the website here.  This is a capacity of the website that we are developing. 

Lastly, the completion of these papers signified that another group of students will soon be graduating from the program. We hope that the social media effort we have started will serve to keep our growing number of alumni connected to us and to each other.  Let me know your ideas for how we can make these efforts more effective.       

501c-4 Nonprofits Acting Like PACs--Its Not a Good Development!

Blog # 2   10/05/12 

Since we are in the middle of a national election campaign, this week I want to speak briefly about how some nonprofits are beginning to function like political action committees (PACs). 

Unfortunately, since the Supreme Court declared in its Citizen’s United decision that individuals and corporations can make unlimited contributions to political campaigns, 501c-4 “social welfare” nonprofits are being formed with the primary intent of influencing the outcome of elections.  Furthermore, these organizations are being used to “launder” political campaign contributions and to circumvent the donor disclosure requirements that are contained in our country's campaign finance laws.  You see, unlike highly regulated PACs that can fund campaigns, 501c-4 organizations are under no legal obligation to disclose the names and amounts of their donors.  The secret funding of political activities is not a good thing for our democracy—the Supreme Court says so right in its Citizen’s United decision-- and having nonprofit organizations conducting these anti-democratic activities cannot be a good thing for the image of the nonprofit sector.  Therefore, nonprofit leaders and the public should be advocating strongly for the vigorous enforcement of existing rules that prohibit 501c-4s from being formed primarily for purposes of influencing elections, and also for a change in IRS rules and regulations to explicitly prohibit nonprofits from using undisclosed contributions to fund election campaigns. 

Recent media articles about the corrosive impact of secret campaign contributions on the democratic process and the inability of the IRS to monitor and restrict the activities of 501c-4 organizations can be found at: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/us/politics/groups-shield-political-gifts-of-businesses.html?pagewanted=all

and

http://www.propublica.org/article/dark-money-group-told-IRS-wouldnt-be-political-spent-million-on-ads

Thoughts?  

Jeff Greim

Is the General Public Losing Faith in Nonprofit Sector?

Aside:  I am totally new to social media. So I will be interest to see if I really have something worth sharing each week or so, and whether others will find my “sharings” interesting.

By way of introduction, I’d like to provide some context for what will come.  In particular, I am very concerned about the sustainability of the US nonprofit  sector because I sense that the general public is losing faith in the sector’s promise to actually serve the “public good” in an effective, efficient, and economic manner.  And as public trust in the sector erodes, so will public support for the sector’s preferential tax status that is a cornerstone of how the sector operates. 

At the same time, I am hopeful that through innovation the sector can better fulfill its promise and thereby improve the quality of life in the communities in which we live and contribute to the overall health of our national and global society. With better outcomes will come greater public trust and greater public support for the sector. But developing and implementing this innovation will require the emergence of pro-active and purposeful leadership from within the sector.  

And so I anticipate that you will see these twin themes pop up periodically in my “sharings.” I also anticipate that the inspiration for my content will come from current  media stories and publications, and from class discussion that occur in the graduate nonprofit courses I teach here at Bay Path College. I welcome and encourage comments.  It is through dialogue that we truly learn and grow.  

Thanks, Jeff