Nonprofit Administration and Management Commons^™

Turning The Ship: Moving From Clinical Treatment To Environmental Prevention: A Health Disparities Policy Advocacy Initiative, Mary Kreger, Claire D. Brindis, Abigail Arons, Katherine Sargent, Annalisa Robles, Astrid Hendricks, Mona Jhawar, Marion Standish

The Foundation Review

· This article examines success factors for a statewide initiative to reduce health disparities by establishing environmental policies to reduce asthma risk factors for school-aged children.

· Twelve local coalitions and a statewide network focused on schools, housing, and outdoor air policies.

· Multiple types and levels of policy advocacy were encouraged by the Initiative so that issues at the local level linked to larger issues across the state, and conversely state-level policies supported local endeavors.

· Factors that contributed to the success of the initiative included: structuring the initiative on a systems change model; employing multiple technical assistance providers …

Finding The Win In Wicked Problems: Lessons From Evaluating Public Policy Advocacy, John Sherman, Gayle Peterson

The Foundation Review

· Many of the social issues private foundations and other philanthropies attempt to address — poverty, homelessness, global climate change — are wicked problems. That is, they defy easy definition, lack permanent solutions, and have multiple stakeholders.

· The wicked problems framework helps make explicit the challenging nature of the issue to be addressed, requires an inclusive style of leadership that seeks stakeholder involvement, and demands candid exchange among stakeholders about the nature of the problem and effectiveness of efforts to address it.

· A wicked problems framework provides a set of criteria and questions for evaluators of advocacy efforts …

A Road Made By Walking: Participatory Evaluation And Social Change, Janet Rechtman

The Foundation Review

· This article describes how participatory evaluation was used in a Ford Foundation–funded project to promote mixed-income housing in Atlanta.

· The project resulted in an increase in mixedincome housing, but also in social outcomes such as increased knowledge about housing issues.

· Validity and reliability of the findings are demonstrated through feedback from the community members, rather than through statistical methods.

Leveraging Grantmaking: Understanding The Dynamics Of Complex Social Systems, David Peter Stroh

The Foundation Review

· The nonobvious interrelationships among elements in a complex system often thwart people’s best intentions to sustainably improve system performance.

· The complex, nonlinear problems that most foundations address can be solved most effectively by thinking systemically instead of linearly about these problems.

· Systems thinking offers a range of analytic tools to improve our capacity to think systemically, including ways to distinguish problem symptoms from root causes, reinforcing and balancing feedback, system archetypes, mental models, and system purpose and goals.

· Applying these tools enables us to target highleverage interventions that can lead to sustainable, system-wide improvement.

· These …

Tools To Support Public Policy Grantmaking, Martha Campbell, Julia Coffman

The Foundation Review

· This article provides guidance on how foundations can frame, focus, and advance efforts to achieve public policy reforms.

· Five essential steps for developing public policy strategy are described: choosing the public policy goal, understanding the challenges, identifying influential audiences, determining how far those audiences must move, and deciding how to move them.

· Two tools developed specifically to support foundations during the strategy development process are presented.

Effective Advocacy Evaluation: The Role Of Funders, Johanna Morariu, Kathleen Brennan

The Foundation Review

· This article addresses the role of funders in supporting advocacy and advocacy evaluation work.

· The growth and strengthening of the advocacy evaluation field has lessened the “hard to measure” stigma attached to advocacy grantmaking.

· An increasingly broad array of evaluation designs and methods better capture advocacy data, enable rapid analysis and learning, and foster accountability.

· Based on a study of advocacy grantees and a study of advocacy grantmakers, the authors conclude that supporting evaluation and capacity building, providing multi-year funding commitments and core support, and creating custom reporting requirements and timelines are strategies that funders can …

New Voices At The Civic Table: Facilitating Personal And Social Change, Laura T. Pinsoneault, Linda Nguyen

The Foundation Review

· This article describes six pilot initiatives of the Alliance for Children and Families -- New Voices at the Civic Table (New Voices), a philanthropy-funded effort to challenge human service organizations to integrate civic engagement as a permanent part of their infrastructure.

· All six New Voices models included common elements: leadership training, civic education, experiential learning, participatory decision-making, networking, and reflective evaluation.

· Each also reflected one of four primary variations to civic engagement based on their community needs and demands: self-efficacy, constituent involvement, mobilizing, and organizing.

· Results demonstrate that civic engagement in human services not only produces …

The Blind Men And The Elephant: Learning A Little At A Time About Civic Engagement, Melanie Moore Kubo, Ashley Mckenna

The Foundation Review

· This article, written from the perspective of the evaluator, describes what happened in one community in which four noncollaborating funders were supporting community development programs.

· The Treeline Collaborative evolved from grassroots origins to become a leading organization in the community, serving as a one-stop shop for many programs and providing a structure for civic engagement of residents.

· A collaborative evaluation would have enabled a deeper understanding of the Treeline Collaborative, the outcomes it attained and missed, and the multiple roles it plays in the community, perhaps leading to more effective program and funding decisions.

Measuring The Impacts Of Advocacy And Community Organizing: Application Of A Methodology And Initial Findings, Lisa Ranghelli

The Foundation Review

· The increasing emphasis by funders on strategic grantmaking and measurable outcomes may be a disincentive to support policy and advocacy work, because of the perception that outcomes can be difficult to assess.

· A tool for measuring impact can reduce the barriers to funding advocacy and policy work.

· The tool draws upon the literatures on evaluating advocacy and organizing, social capital building efforts, and return on investment approaches to evaluation.

· The tool was applied in two sites, where funders found it useful to understand advocacy impacts and learn how advocacy can enhance their grantmaking goals.

A Model For Multilevel Advocacy Evaluation, Tanya Beer, Ehren D. Reed

The Foundation Review

· The Colorado Trust provided three years of general operating support to nine advocacy organizations working to increase access to health through policy change work.

· The nine grantees had a variety of goals and strategies and had different levels of organizational capacity, but were evaluated using a uniform evaluation approach.

· The evaluation was designed to build grantees’ own evaluation capacity to incorporate real-time feedback, monitor progress toward goals, and to assess growth in the overall health advocacy community in Colorado.

· Individual grantees identified short- and intermediate- term outcomes related to The Trust’s intermediate outcomes, which were in …

Jewish Family Service Employee Development Plan, Brenda Bothel, Karen Gould, Dorothy L. O'Hagan

Human Resource and Volunteer Management

Working as consultants on behalf of the USD Nonprofit Leadership program, Brenda Bothel, Dorothy O’Hagan, and Karen Gould partnered with Jewish Family Service (JFS) in San Diego, California to redesign and implement a new employee performance evaluation process. The following pages document the steps taken and research used by the USD consulting team in order to come up with a new employee evaluation process for JFS which will be referred to as the Employee Development Plan.

Engineering Value Into Enterprise Risk Management; Six Sigma Techniques Can Improve The Quality Of Erm Processes And Enable Organizations To Manage Risks More Successfully, Sridhar Ramamoorti, Marcia Weidenmier Watson, Mark Zabel

Accounting Faculty Publications

Organizations should not only recognize and minimize traditional downside risks, but also embrace upside risks, or opportunities, as a strategy for success. According to a 2005 survey by management consulting firm Booz Allen, 87 percent of the market value lost by large companies with market capitalizations over US $1 billion was the result of strategic and operational blunders. Compliance failure, typically the focus of downside risk, destroyed only 13 percent of market value during the five-year study. Faced with this counter-intuitive finding, companies may wish to pursue a more balanced and positive approach to risk management. Enterprise risk management (ERM) …

2008 The Grantmaking Report: Foundation And Corporate Giving In The San Diego Region, Laura Deitrick, Robert Donmoyer, Melanie Hitchcock

Foundations and Grantmaking

This study focused on philanthropic organizations that are engaged in organized grantmaking in San Diego County. The bulk of the organizations studied are classified as private foundations; data that describe other important grantmaking organizations—i.e., San Diego’s community foundations, selected corporate giving programs, and the United Way of San Diego—also were analyzed.

Breaking The Tire Cycle Advocacy Campaign, Benny Cartwright, Maureen Guarcello, Ben Mccue, Jennifer Martin, Adina Veen

Advocacy and Lobbying

WiLDCOAST, an environmental nonprofit on the United States-Mexico border has a program that focuses on the flow of used tires into California from Mexico was a huge burden on local communities. This program was the basis for this advocacy campaign which focuses on a legislative "fix" to "break the tire cycle," and reduce the associated economic, public health, and environmental impacts that these tires cause.

This project became state law.

The Growth Of Nonprofit Accounting And It's Impact On Human Services, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Changes in nonprofit accounting standards and practices have spearheaded a quiet revolution in financial management practice in social agencies and the delivery of human services during the past three decades. These changes have gone hand-in-glove with other changes in the political arena to dramatically transform the ways in which human services are organized and delivered. At the core of this transition has been the movement from fund to enterprise accounting, together with such larger political developments as the expansion of grant-based relations with government into the performance management environment of purchase of service contracting.

Using Van Valens Procedure In Business Research To Assess Consistent Differences In Multidimensional Variability In Two Or More Groups, Mark L. Berenson, Kimberly Killmer Hollister

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Much business research involves comparisons in two or more groups on many dimensions. This paper primarily focuses on demonstrating and providing guidance as to how researchers should approach a multivariate analysis in the comparison of sets of corresponding characteristics in two or more independent groups. In particular, this paper demonstrates the utility of a simple but not widely known procedure developed by Van Valen (1978) that should be employed to test for the significance of differences in overall variability in the sets of corresponding characteristics in two or more groups, a test that enjoys much statistical power in detecting significant …

2008 Alumni Perspectives: Evaluation Of The Nonprofit Leadership And Management Masters Program, Linda Seifert, Heather Carpenter

USD Evaluation of Applied Learning Model in Nonprofit Leadership and Management Master's Program

In Spring 2008 the Caster Family Center for Nonprofit Research, along with the SOLES Director of Assessment, completed an alumni survey. The survey focused on how well the Nonprofit Leadership and Management program learning outcomes prepared the alumni for their professional roles, how those roles may have changed as a result of their preparation, their level of satisfaction with the various components of the program, and their perspectives on their current involvement with the program. All 65 alumni of the program were invited to participate in the survey.

The Appreciated Sector: Public Confidence In San Diego County Nonprofit Organizations, Lindsey M. Mcdougle, Laura Deitrick, Pat Libby, Robert Donmoyer

State of Nonprofits and Philanthropy in San Diego

Do San Diegans have confidence in the nonprofit sector? How are you affected as a nonprofit leader? Read the results on the most comprehensive survey ever conducted on this topic!

The Stewardship Academy: Fostering Tomorrow's Stewards A Nonprofit Business Plan For Community Stewardship, Cody Nelson

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduate requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

The Changing Components Of The Corporate Annual Report: An Update, Deborah S. Archambeault, John G. Fulmer Jr., Richard A. Turpin

Accounting Faculty Publications

Recent regulatory changes affect not only the content of annual reports but also the population of companies that are required to comply with these reporting regulations. Lenders need to stay abreast of the information provided in corporate reporting packages. This article provides an update on regulatory changes and discusses how these changes affect the information that can be found in corporate annual reports.

2007 Report Of Recruitment And Retention Of Nonprofit Employees In Utah County, Susan R. Madsen

Marketing and Strategy Faculty Publications

The primary purpose of this study was to determine the various elements influencing recruitment and retention of nonprofit employees within Utah County. We measured retention by asking questions in four primary categories: 1) willingness to stay; 2) length of plans to stay (how long the employee plans to stay); 3) job satisfaction; and 4) perceived job availabilities. We measured one element of recruiting by asking employees about their job referral method (i.e., how they heard about the job opening for their current position). This section (Section II) will only discuss findings among the five variables as they relate to each …

Philanthropy: Giving Meaninfully, Gerard Ee

Social Space

Helming one of Singapore’s more prominent non-profit organisations, the National Kidney Foundation, at a time when public confidence has been severely shaken, is a feat that requires more than just heartwarming feelings of goodwill. As the giving climate in Singapore gives way to donor fatigue and a degree of scepticism, Gerard Ee tells Social Space the kind of philanthropic acts that he thinks will bring local charity to the next level.

More Than Just Tugging At The Heartstrings, B. Joon Park

Social Space

If you are a non-profit organisation and thinking about starting a social enterprise in Singapore, B. Joon Park has some start-up tips.

The Charity Ecosystem, Willie Cheng

Social Space

The non-profit sector is slowly moving from an era of ‘Just Doing Good’ to one of ‘Doing Good Well’. Willie Cheng argues that this new era requires the various components of an effective and self-sustaining charity ecosystem – regulator, capacity builders, charities, beneficiaries and the community (individuals, corporations, media and government) – to be in place and functioning properly.

Tracing Singapore's Social Sector, Sharifah Maisharah

Social Space

How has the face of Singapore’s social sector changed through the shifting landscape of state provision? Sharifah Maisharah looks at the evolution of the social sector pastiche starting from colonial rule in 1819.

Resuscitating A Healthcare Charity, R Akhileswaran, Seet Ai Mee

Social Space

When government funding policies change, voluntary welfare organisations that depend largely on subsidies to run their services can find their survival at stake. Dr R Akhileswaran and Dr Seet Ai Mee present the case study of HCA Hospice Care.

When Is A Voluntary Code Not Voluntary?, Yuen Teen Mak

Social Space

Many countries have adopted the ‘comply or explain’ approach to raise standards of corporate governance in listed companies. The approach has now found its way into the charity sector in Singapore. Mak Yuen Teen highlights some misconceptions about the voluntary nature of the approach and provides suggestions for its effective implementation.

Social 'Service-Innovation', Usha Menon

Social Space

How can not-for-profit organisations move away from a traditional grant-seeking model to one that can catalyse and value-add the sector at large, beyond just meeting basic needs? Usha Menon thinks Youth for Causes might provide just that model.

Why Being A For-Profit In The Non-Profit Sector Makes Sense, Carolyn Seah

Social Space

In 2007, the Lien Centre for Social Innovation was commissioned by the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports to study the social enterprise space in Singapore for the first time. Carolyn Seah summarises the study’s findings.

Entrepreneurial Spirit In Government Managed Enterprises: Evidence From The U.S. General Aviation Airports, Vitaly S. Guzhva, Massoud Bazargan, David A. Byers

Management, Marketing and Operations - Daytona Beach

While a number of studies introduce entrepreneurship in the public sector, there is still a need for empirical research in this field. We use a survey of U.S. general aviation airport managers to investigate the benefits of entrepreneurial spirit in public sector management. The results of logistic regressions suggest that the airport managers’ beliefs in importance of self-sustainability significantly improve the likelihood of general aviation airports to be self-sustaining. On the other hand, the airport specific characteristics, such as a favorable location, county population, and others are not statistically significant in achieving self-sustainability. Our findings support the literature that argue …