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Nonprofit organizations with less quantifiable missions will find this approach more difficult. The mission of the Girl Scouts of the USA, for instance, is to help young girls reach their full potential as citizens. The Girl Scouts commissioned a large-scale study concluding that its members
do indeed become more successful, responsible citizens than do women who hadn’t been Scouts. 1 The study got around the problem of defining the term “responsible citizens” by using proxies such as professional success, divorce rates, and participa- tion in civic life (for instance,
Since the Girl Scouts now has evidence that its programs work, it measures success by counting the number of girls in its programs
voting), as well as self-reported measures of happiness and satisfaction. It did not, however, control for the problem of selection bias: girls who signed up for the Girl Scouts might have become more successful citizens even if they hadn’t done so, because of their personal characteristics or family back- ground. Nonetheless, the organization does have evidence, albeit fuzzy, that its programs work. It now measures its success in achieving its mission by counting the number of children (particularly from historically underrepre- sented demographic and socioeconomic groups) in its programs. For most nonprofit organizations, however, narrowing the scope of the mis- sion isn’t an option and investing in research into outcomes isn’t feasible. The Nature Conservancy, for example, could conceivably calculate changes in the Earth’s total biodiversity, but the benefits of that approach wouldn’t justify the astronomical cost of doing so. The Conservancy’s work has at best only a modest—if not imperceptible—effect on global biodiversity, which is affected on a far greater scale by other factors, such as tropical deforestation, climate change, and the conversion of habitats. These nonprofits have a third option for measuring their success in achiev- ing their mission: they can develop microlevel goals that, if achieved, would imply success on a grander scale. The Nature Conservancy can’t measure global biodiversity, but it can closely examine biodiversity in the areas it manages. So it has chosen to determine its success in achieving its mission by gauging the success of its biodiversity health and threat-abatement efforts in the areas it protects. Both are relatively easy to measure: to measure the success of the biodiversity-health effort, the Conservancy evaluates the condition of all the plants and animals it is trying to save against a baseline set of data established by existing scientific surveys; to measure the success of its efforts to control threats to biodiversity, the Conservancy tracks its 1 Defining Success: American Women, Achievement, and the Girl Scouts , Girl Scouts of the USA, September 1999. Louis Harris and Associates conducted the research.
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