Reflecting on Grantee Evaluation Accountability to Funders: Exploring Power Dynamics with Grassroots Organizations in Communities of Color

Grassroots organizations in communities of color often struggle in their relationships with philanthropic partners, especially as it relates to the issue of accountability. This article focuses on exploring the nature of accountability within the social contract between the philanthropic sector and these grassroots organizations. Drawing on a review of the relevant literature and results of 11 structured interviews with leaders from the philanthropic sector and grassroots organizations in communities of color, key themes are identified. Recommendations are offered on how the hierarchy within the sector can be addressed and how the dialogue between these partners can be improved.     

Follower or Challenger? How Chinese Non-governmental Organizations Manage Accountability Requirements from Funders

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) sometimes disagree with their funders’ accountability requirements; however, their dependence on the funders’ resources makes it difficult to express their disagreement. This dilemma for NGOs may keep funders from substantively holding NGOs to account and cause mission drift for the NGOs. This paper analyzes an in-depth case study of an understudied scenario: how a newly founded NGO engages with multiple funders with varying competence in accountability practices. By analyzing a Chinese NGO’s accountability relationships with its funders, we found that the NGO’s responses varied according to its organizational interests and how it perceived the funders’ competence. Better trust meant better compliance. Therefore, to secure compliance, it is important to enhance NGOs’ trust in funders’ competence. Based on the findings, we suggest that funders be more aware of NGOs’ agency, be ready to engage in ongoing collaborative learning with NGOs and align NGOs’ interests with the accountability requirements.

     

Putting the Lasts First: The Case for Community-Focused and Peer-Managed NGO Accountability Mechanisms

The calls for NGO accountability have grown louder in recent years, some based on genuine concerns to help improve their performance and others on a desire to muffle their advocacy activities. Using a comprehensive analytical framework, this article finds that current accountability approaches prioritize accountability to boards and donors and give weak accountability to communities despite strong NGO rhetoric to the contrary. The article recommends the development of accountability mechanisms managed by NGO coordination bodies and focused primarily on accountability to communities to improve NGO performance and protect them from politically motivated attacks.     

Accountability revisited: the arrival of client outcome evaluation

In the past few years, "accountability" for public mental health programs has become differentiated in the minds of not only program evaluators, but also program managers and funders, including state and local-level legislators. Increasingly, these officials are becoming concerned with more than just the numbers and targets of services delivered, and the cost involved, and are looking for evidence of positive outcome or impact on clients to justify program implementation and maintenance. This represents a significant move beyond the two accountability models that most recently seemed to be the focus of most formal accountability efforts--performance measurement and quality assurance. Pressures for implementing these two alternatives seem to have been reduced somewhat by the new federal Administration, but even prior to its advent there had been a rapid escalation in awareness of and concern for client outcome measurement among important audiences, including state and local mental health policy-makers and the U.S. Congress. This presents a major new opportunity and challenge for program evaluators at this new accountability focus continues to gather momentum.     

Dangerous Privilege: Trans Men,Masculinities, and Changing Perceptions of Safety

This article examines the construction of masculinities in social interaction through in‐depth interviews with trans men living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Interviewees’ concerns for safety, particularly the threat of violence from other men, shaped their masculine practices, which led some men to practice defensive masculinities and, for others, constrained their ability to practice transformative masculinities. Respondents’ concerns for safety, and their masculine practices, changed according to variation in transition, physical location, audience, and their physical stature. These findings have implications for the relationship between men's fear of violent victimization and accountability to situated gender expectations in interaction and the persistence of gender inequality. Theoretically, this article engages a complex understanding of accountability and multiple masculinities to argue that the perceived threat of violence shapes men's practices in interaction. The fear of violence encourages conformity and inhibits men's transformative practices.     

Struggling to Get It Right

This article examines the challenges public and nonprofit human service funders face in the performance measurement process and the strategies they use to address these challenges. We use survey and interview data to compare funders’ experiences across a region. Common challenges included dissatisfaction with formal data collection procedures, difficulty getting providers to comply with reporting requirements, provider performance problems, and lack of capacity to use performance information. Capacity issues were a greater concern for smaller funders. Funders used a variety of strategies to address challenges. Use of some strategies depended on context. Practices were relatively consistent across funder groups.     

Measuring to Improve Versus Measuring to Prove: Understanding the Adoption of Social Performance Measurement Practices in Nascent Social Enterprises

Social enterprises are described as organizations with dual objectives—social and commercial. While the measurement of commercial performance is relatively straightforward and well understood, our understanding of the factors related to measuring social performance is more ambiguous. Is the adoption of social performance measurement (SPM) practices more related to external pressures, such as the need to demonstrate legitimacy to funders and peers, or is it more closely related to the growing rationalization within the social sector? We examine the relationship between external and internal factors and the adoption of SPM using a novel dataset of 1864 nascent social enterprises from around the world. Our findings suggest support for the argument that the adoption of SPM in social enterprise is related to the growing rationalization of the social sector, which challenges some of the past research on this topic, and provides a more nuanced perspective of SPM in social enterprise.     

Nonprofit Comparative Research: Recent Agendas and Future Trends

Comparative research on nonprofit organizations (NPOs) has been a prominent approach for advancing our understanding of these organizations. This article identifies the primary drivers that shape the NPO comparative research agenda and explores new research trends. Based on a systematic literature review, nine definitional aspects and ten impulses are identified as drivers of NPO research. This article conducts a correspondence analysis to study the relationships between the definitional aspects and impulses that are discussed in 111 articles that were published in philanthropic and third-sector journals in the period January 2001–January 2015. Based on our results, we suggest three new clusters for future comparative research: investment and growth, participation and social impact, and social cohesion and civil society.     

Measuring Social Return on Investment

Strategic decision making and evaluation in philanthropic giving and social investment requires good‐quality information about the social impacts of that investment. One way to meet this need is by calculating a social return on investment (SROI) measure, akin to the return on investment (ROI) approach used in business analysis. Despite much buzz in the field, SROI measurements are rarely used, in part because of the complexity of the calculations but also because of a number of thorny and often expensive organizational challenges associated with implementing an SROI process. This article explores these implementation challenges by comparing four social venture organizations in the health care field—two in the Netherlands and two in the United States—that have utilized some sort of SROI measurement. We summarize the SROI process and identify the specific organizational challenges in each case. Lessons learned from this analysis include the value of process versus product and the importance of fitting the type of measurement to the organizational context. We conclude with a summary of best practices for organizations and social investors who might try to make effective use of SROI measures.     

Towards a sociology of risk work: A narrative review and synthesis

In this article, we define the concept of “risk work,” which aims to make visible working practices to assess or manage risk, in order to subject these practices to sociological critique. This article reviews and synthesizes existing published literature to identify components of risk work: (a) translating risk into different contexts, (b) minimizing risks in practice, and (c) caring in the context of risk. We argue that these three components of risk work raise important tensions for workers that have been inadequately explored in the literature to date. We propose that future research should additionally focus on practitioner subjectivity and identity in risk work. In addition, we argue that comparative research—across type of risk and different contexts—and methodological and theoretical diversity would enhance this emerging field of research.     

Back to Basics

Nonprofits are under increased accountability pressures to demonstrate their effectiveness. Output measurement (how much is produced) is disregarded as simplistic. Emphasis is made instead on measuring outcomes (changes in the lives of beneficiaries) or impacts (effects developed relative to the mission of the nonprofit, or the overall public good), and a growing portion of organizations state that they measure these effects. However, we question the assumption that outputs such as the number of beneficiaries served are being adequately measured. We first review existing research gaps on results measurement practices and discuss the main types of obstacles to the quality and utility of evaluation data. In this context, we argue for the need to reground nonprofit evaluation in the profound knowledge available about beneficiary populations. We discuss the potential and limitations of reach, a basic output indicator that is defined as the number of individuals directly affected by a nonprofit, and explore the organizational drivers of reach measurement. Evidence from 2,229 nonprofits shows they still lack adequate data on the beneficiaries they serve, face relevant conceptual and practical hurdles when trying to identify them, and are significantly influenced by organizational factors in their capacity to track them. Our research not only shows that nonprofits fail to adequately measure outputs, but also that measuring the number of beneficiaries served and how they are served is not as straightforward as outcome and impact advocates suggest. Practitioners and funders are reminded of the need to place beneficiaries at the core of their evaluation efforts.     

Fundraising in the new philanthropy environment: The benefits and challenges of working with giving circles

This article reports on an exploratory study to understand the impact of the new philanthropy on funding recipients by asking nonprofit professionals about their experiences working with giving circles. Giving circles are growing in number across the United States. They are attractive to new philanthropy donors who pool their resources and then decide together where to give them away. They also frequently include social, educational, and volunteer engagement components. Giving circles seem to be an important source of new and expanded resources for nonprofit organizations, but there are both benefits and challenges to working with giving circles that reveal several problematic tensions for nonprofit funding recipients, the philanthropic relationship, and society more broadly.     

Social Service Research and Religion

Abstract

Development of accountability standards to demonstrate cause and effect relationships are gaining rapid advancement in the field of social sciences. Many governmental agencies, foundations, and other funders have developed approaches that require organizations to utilize science-based programs and incorporate evaluative methods to show improved outcomes and cost benefits to society. This article will examine the need for increased accountability in developing effective interventions by faith-based organizations in the delivery of social service interventions. Recently, there has been a strong movement toward governmental funding for faith-based institutions to provide social services, although there has been inadequate scientific data to demonstrate that approaches implemented are effective in meeting needs or yielding favorable outcomes. Similarly, many faith-based organizations provide innovative and effective programs that could serve as model programs if there was appropriate empirical evidence. This article will discuss how rigorous evaluative approaches such as randomized clinical control trials can produce scientific data on program effectiveness. We will use a case example in the field of drug and alcohol treatment to illustrate these points.     

Accountability in action?: the case of a database purchasing decision 1

The increasing prevalence of audit in university settings has raised concerns about the potentially adverse effects of invasive measures of performance upon the conduct of research and generation of knowledge. What sustains the current commitment to audit? It is argued that in order to address this question we need to understand how and to what extent notions of accountability are played out in practice. This is illustrated through the analysis of materials from an ethnographic study of ‘good management practice’ in the deployment of technologies in university settings. The paper examines the ways in which ideas of accountability — involving considerations such as ‘value for money’— inform the practical processes of deciding about the purchase of a new database technology.     

The Inherently Contested Nature of Nongovernmental Accountability: The Case of HAP International

While the principled case for humanitarian accountability is relatively straightforward, the practice is demonstrably more complicated, necessitating constant negotiation among stakeholders. However, despite the wave of research into nongovernmental accountability, few empirical studies have grappled with the phenomenon’s inherently contested nature. This paper foregrounds tensions arising in the elaboration of nonprofit accountability. Its approach is informed by critical constructivist theory, an international relations approach attuned to social power, identity and exclusion, and conceptual contestation; its conclusions are supported by interview data with key stakeholders. Focusing on the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP) International, it finds that initial consensus on the desirability of beneficiary (downward) accountability quickly gave way to principled disagreements and operational difficulties. Specifically, the initiation stage of HAP was marked by two conflicts—a debate about enforcement and a turf war over control—culminating in rebranding and relocation. The implementation stage was characterized by tensions over certification and intra-organizational struggles over leadership. The contemporary practice of accountability is shown to be a contingent and contested social process, with humanitarian identity and practice ultimately at stake.

     

What is Negotiated in Negotiated Accountability? The Case of INGOs

This paper discusses the constructivist, negotiated perspective to INGO accountability. According to this perspective, INGO accountability is a process of mutual negotiations between different INGO stakeholders who hold different accountability demands. Acknowledging that this perspective provides a good starting point for a better understanding of INGO accountability, we comment on this conceptualization of INGO accountability. Through an analysis of accountability instruments and procedures, we examine closely how the demands of the INGO’s stakeholders are embedded in particular relationships of accountability which are sustained by particular accountability logics. From this analysis, we point out that, due to the differences that exist between these accountability logics, processes of negotiation are likely to be filled with complex tensions and trade-offs. Moreover, as some accountability logics are much clearer and more compelling than others, a constructivist perspective on INGO accountability does not automatically coincide with an understanding of INGO accountability in which primordial importance is given to the beneficiaries.     

Devolution of Services to Children and Families: The Experience of NPOs in Nanaimo,British Columbia,Canada

This study focuses on the current experience of Nanaimos nonprofit family and child service organizations (N = 29) providing services on behalf of government and their adaptation to this devolution. The effects and consequences of contracting on organizational practices, accountability, and services were explored through interviews and focus groups with executive directors, board members, line staff, government representatives, and the United Way. Results show that a significant proportion of funding comes from provincial government contracts. The funding climate is uncertain, and there is considerable confusion, stress, and time involved with the contracting process. Accountability requirements are demanding and nonprofit organizations (NPOs) express concern about a shift to a business management model. Recommendations include a need for increased collaboration between NPOs, a body that speaks for the voluntary sector, and improved relationships between NPOs and government funders.     

Foundations as investment managers part 1: The process

Foundations in the United States manage more than $130 billion in investment resources. In managing these assets, foundations must balance the competing goals of promoting charitable good deeds through the distribution of grants and stewarding the assets that can support such grants in the future. This paper examines how foundations perform the function of managing their financial assets and whether they follow modern practices of portfolio management in doing so. The data presented here provide reason to suspect that many foundations are giving insufficient attention to preserving and enhancing the available philanthropic resources under their control. Analysis of actual investment performance is the subject of a sequel article in the next issue of Nonprofit Management and Leadership.     

Let People Be People: Everyday Substance Use in a Public Work Site

This article complicates the prevailing portrait of substance use as being incompatible with work. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic data of one informal economic zone collected over a four-year period between January 2010 and January 2014, I expose the daily interactions through which substance use becomes compatible with work and the mechanisms by which drug and alcohol use become embedded in the local ecology of a public work site. To capture the ways in which people link their substance use to their experience of work, I utilize three concepts—taking a break, maintaining a cycle, and tipping the balance—each of which is suggestive of different patterned relationships between substance use and work in public. Data indicate that people link their substance use to their work in different ways and with different consequences and that each of these patterned relationships becomes an interrelated part of a single social system. These findings add necessary nuance and complexity to substance use literature, which is more frequently focused on abject abuse and disorder, and provide a more complete understanding of the ways in which substance use practices become linked to urban economies. Furthermore, they illuminate how participation in informal economic activity can play a variety of roles in the lives of people engaged in substance use practices.     

Making sense of accountability: Conceptual perspectives for northern and southern nonprofits

This article examines the concept of accountability from various disciplinary lenses in order to develop an integrated understanding of the term. Special attention is devoted to principal—agent perspectives from political science and economics. An integrated framework is developed, based on four central observations. (1) Accountability is relational in nature and is constructed through inter‐ and intraorganizational relationships. (2) Accountability is complicated by the dual role of nonprofits as both principals and agents in their relationships with other actors. (3) Characteristics of accountability necessarily vary with the type of nonprofit organization being examined. (4) Accountability operates through external as well as internal processes, such that an emphasis on external oversight and control misses other dimensions of accountability essential to nonprofit organizations. The analysis draws from the experiences of both Northern and Southern nonprofits, that is, organizations based in wealthy industrialized regions of the world (the global North) and those in economically poorer areas (the South).