OTHER  RELEVANT RESOURCES_PAGE HEADER

Other Relevant Resources

quote1Resources that can serve as a springboard for thought, conversation, and planning.quote1

Following are other relevant resources to help you improve your organization’s effectiveness. If you have additional materials to suggest, please let us know.

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A Little Book with a National Impact

Yvonne Zipp, Christian Science Monitor, May 14, 2012
Christian Science Monitor correspondent Yvonne Zipp traces the origins of and motivations for Leap of Reason.

Why Foundations Need to Make a Leap of Reason

Phil Buchanan, The Center for Effective Philanthropy blog, July 13, 2011
Phil Buchanan of the Center for Effective Philanthropy uses Leap of Reason to make the case that funders need to support outcomes management for their grantees.

Five Qs for… Mario Morino, Co-Founder/Chair, Venture Philanthropy Partners

Mitch Nauffts, Philanthropy News Digest, January 17, 2012
The Foundation Center’s PhilanTopic Blog features a Q&A with Mario Morino, author of Leap of Reason.

Mario Morino on the fiscal crisis facing nonprofits and the need to rethink and reinvent

Billy Shore, Bearing Witness blog, March 5, 2012
Billy Shore, Founder and CEO of Share our Strength, discusses the need for nonprofits to redesign themselves in this era of scarcity.

Three Things Business Leaders Should Do to Help the Nonprofit Sector — Before It’s Too Late

Rick Wartzman, Forbes, June 19, 2012
Columnist Rick Wartzman says that after Morino’s keynote to the National Human Services Assembly, “a large contingent of nonprofit executives … committed themselves to the kind of bold ‘reinvention’ that he said is so urgent.”

Conversations with Remarkable Givers

Give Smart
Kudos to Bridgespan on its new “Conversations with Remarkable Givers,” a compendium of high-quality videos of donors sharing insights about the whys and hows of their philanthropy. Check out heavyweights like Melinda Gates; Steve and Jean Case; Stanley Druckenmiller; and Nancy Roob.

Slow Ideas

Gawande, Atul, The New Yorker, July 29, 2013
A fascinating article on why it takes high-touch, person-to-person approaches to change long-held attitudes and long-standing practices.

If We Want Our Funding to Change the World

Donors Forum, March 12, 2013
A short video highlighting the importance of the level of funding nonprofits need to make a significant impact.

Calculated Impact” (subscribers only)

Brest, Paul, Hal Harvey, and Kelvin Low, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2009
“The fundamental tenets of strategic philanthropy are that funders and their grantees should have clear goals, strategies based on sound theories of change, and robust methods for assessing progress toward their goals.”

States Perform

Council of State Governments
“States Perform provides users with access to interactive, customizable and up-to-date comparative performance measurement data for 50 states in six key areas: fiscal and economic, public safety and justice, energy and environment, transportation, health and human services, and education.”

Profiles in Performance: Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change

Dresner, Howard, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010
“In Profiles in Performance: Business Intelligence Journeys and the Road Map for Change, Howard Dresner (author of The Performance Management Revolution) worked with several extraordinary organizations to understand their thriving “performance-directed culture.” In doing so, he developed a unique maturity model-which served as both a filter to select candidates and as a lens to examine accomplishments.”

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

Gawande, Atul, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010
“Atul Gawande shows what the simple idea of the checklist reveals about the complexity of our lives and how we can deal with it.”

Collective Impact

Kania, John, and Mark Kramer, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2011
“Large-scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination, yet the social sector remains focused on the isolated intervention of individual organizations.”

Keystone Guides for Impact Planning, Learning, and Assessment

London: Keystone Accountability for Social Change, 2009
Tools to put Impact Planning, Assessment and Learning (IPAL) into action.

Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement and Social Impact

Kramer, Mark, Marcie Parkhurst, and Lalitha Vaidyanathan, Boston: FSG Social Impact Advisors, 2009
A highlight of “20 social enterprises that developed innovative and coordinated web-based approaches to evaluate their impact across multiple grants and stakeholders.”

The Four Horsemen of the Nonprofit Financial Apocalypse

Miller, Clara, Nonprofit Quarterly, March 2010
“An exploration of the new, post-recession operating environment facing nonprofit leaders.”

New Approaches to Evaluating Community Initiatives

Washington, DC: Aspen Institute, 1995

Priorities for a New Decade: Making (More) Social Programs Work (Better)

Philadelphia: Public/Private Ventures, 2011
“In this whitepaper, P/PV proposes a comprehensive and bold re-thinking of how nonprofits are evaluated. Priorities for a New Decade puts forward an approach that fully engages practitioners as partners in evaluation efforts, reflects a deep understanding of local circumstances, and suggests guidelines for evaluation and scaling that support on-the-ground program quality and performance.”

High Ambitions and Scarce Resources in Public Interest Organizations

Scearce, Diane, and Katherine Fulton, Development, August 2004
“Diane Scearce and Katherine Fulton ask how can scenario thinking – a process and suite of tools originally designed for large resource-rich organizations – best be adapted for small resource-constrained organizations working for the public interest? In early 2001, a small team at Global Business Network (GBN) began a journey to answer this question. Scearce and Fulton share the highlights of what they learned. They layout the key barriers they encountered in applying the scenario methodology as it is used in the private sector to the civil society context. They share what they have learnt in adapting their tools in the process.”

Evaluation Blues: How Accountability Requirements Hurt Small, Innovative Programs the Most

Silverstein, Laura, and Erin Maher, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2008
“How accountability requirements hurt small, innovative programs the most.”

Strongly Led, Under-Managed: How Can Visionary Nonprofits Make the Critical Transition to Stronger Management?

Stid, Daniel, and Jeffrey Bradach, Bridgespan Group, August 2008
“The signs of inadequate management are easy to spot: Staff members are confused about their roles and responsibilities. Out-of-control finances, arising from an inability to set and operate within a sustainable budget and /or inadequate financial systems, threaten to overwhelm the organization’s focus on impact. But while it’s not difficult to recognize the problems—and to see that more effective management practices are needed—getting the job done is no small feat.”

Give Smart: Philanthropy That Gets Results

Tierney, Thomas J., and Joel L. Fleishman, New York: PublicAffairs, March 2011
” In Give Smart, Tierney pools his hands-on knowledge with Duke professor Joel L. Fleishman’s expertise to create a much-needed primer for philanthropists and the nonprofit organizations they support. Drawing from personal experiences, research spanning twentieth- and twenty-first-century philanthropy, contemporary interviews, and Bridgespan’s extensive field work, Give Smart presents the definitive guide to engaged philanthropy.”

University HealthSystem Consortium

“UHC offers an array of performance improvement products and services. Powerful databases provide comparative data in clinical, operational, faculty practice management, financial, patient safety, and supply chain areas. Programs such as UHC’s Imperatives for Quality and the UHC/AACN Nurse Residency Program™ offer opportunities for knowledge sharing and education. Listservers allow members from across the country to share information and demonstrate the power of collaboration.”