THE McKINSEY QUARTERLY 2001 NUMBER 2
104
Measuring the success of the mission Our research has found that nonprofit organizations, despite the enormous difficulties, can measure their success in achieving their mission. They have three options. First, a nonprofit group can narrowly define its mission so that progress can be measured directly. The mission of Goodwill Industries, for example, is to raise people out of poverty through work: “A hand up, not a hand out.” Goodwill can therefore measure its success simply by counting the number of people participating in its training programs and then placed in jobs. Its affiliates offer many programs besides those for job train- ing, but all are linked to the core purpose of providing the poor Nonprofit groups that take the option of defining their mission narrowly must avoid the trap of oversimplifying it and treating the symptoms rather than the cause of a particular social prob- lem. Until recently, the mission of the US charity America’s Second Harvest was to feed the hungry, and it could easily quantify its suc- cess by counting the amount of food it collected and distributed. The organization’s leaders have since decided to expand their activities to address the underlying problem and have therefore adopted a more ambitious mis- sion: ending hunger in the United States. Advocacy and public-education efforts have become a larger part of the charity’s agenda, and the organiza- tion’s success will be judged not only by statistics on hunger but also by changes in public attitudes as expressed in opinion surveys. A second option for measuring the success of an organization in achieving its mission is to invest in research to determine whether its activities actually do help to mitigate the problems or to promote the benefits that the mission involves. The nonprofit organization Jump$tart Coalition, dedicated to improving the educational outcomes of poor children, is a good example of this approach. One of the biggest challenges facing the federal education program Head Start is that many children leave it, at age five, still unprepared for school. Jump$tart developed a program to help Head Start’s lowest achievers, at age four, improve their basic literacy skills. Statistical studies, updated periodically, have clearly shown that Jump$tart graduates enter kindergarten better prepared than do similar children who didn’t participate in the program and, more important, that its graduates have better educa- tional outcomes throughout primary school. With the link between the organization’s program and mission firmly established, Jump$tart can now measure its success by the number of children in its programs. with employment. By contrast, Catholic Charities and World Vision, though comparable organizations, have broader antipoverty missions that are impossible to quantify directly.
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