What is on the minds of today’s nonprofit executives?  Leading topics of conversation include mission translation, measurement, and benchmarking.  Susan Colby, a Partner at Bridgespan, shared her insights through a discussion hosted by Stanford’s Center for Social Innovation:

1. Always start with mission.  Mission statements are broad, aspirational, and inspiring; they don’t tell you what to do Monday morning.  To fill that gap in practical application, the following questions must be answered:

      What is your ‘Intended Impact’? 
      What are you trying to accomplish? 
      What can you be held accountable for? 
      Who are your beneficiaries? 
      What is your ‘Theory of Change’? 
      How will you get from A to B? 
      How will you accomplish these things starting from where you are today?

Together, these answers should cement the roots of the organization.  These answers should serve as an objective lens for reviewing existing strategies and assessing incoming opportunities.

2. Measure outcomes, not activities:  Are you on track?  Nonprofits often measure outputs of activities.  What happens, though, when you find out your activities don’t have the intended impact?  What good are the 3,000 extra brochures you sent out if they all end up in the trash?  Metrics should align with impact, not activities.

3. Advocate for better benchmarks.  For-profit companies spend far more than 10% on overhead, yet this is a widely accepted benchmark for nonprofit performance.  Why the double standard??  To level the playing field, the nonprofit sector must increase public understanding of the need to invest in infrastructure and capacity building.  We must shift the conversation from outputs to impact: not “How much are you investing in overhead?” but rather, “What impact are you having for the resources you are investing?”

In short, nonprofit leaders want to understand and communicate the impact of their work.  This happens first through practical definition of their mission, then through clear measurement of their performance, and finally through comparison against just benchmarks. 

For more detail, you can tune into the hour-long conversation with Susan here: (http://sic.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3211.html)