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?