This article appeared in the Spring 2008 edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR).

Can nonprofit organizations become more efficient without sacrificing quality?

As the experiences of Teach for America, Jumpstart, and Year Up attest, such productivity gains can happen. But they don’t just happen. To achieve meaningful economies, these three organizations standardized their best practices, invested in essential people and processes, managed their costs, and measured their progress.

Doing so is not easy because of the nature of nonprofits’ work. For example, tracking cost per output (say, one youth served) might be relatively straightforward, but tracking cost per outcome (a youth who achieves the results targeted by the organization) is a much more complex endeavor. Prevailing funding practices can also raise barriers, among them: lack of funding for non-program expenses such as building the organizational capacity to enable growth, lack of external pressure to assess productivity, and funding commitments that are too short to sustain a given program long enough to decrease its costs and/or improve its success rate.

Done right, however, reducing cost per outcome will lead to more bang for the nonprofit buck—a greater impact across the whole range of issues that nonprofits grapple with on society’s behalf.

This article appeared in the Spring 2008 edition of Education Next.

U.S. public school leaders increasingly agree about the elements that drive student results, such as a college preparatory curriculum and instructional coaching. Yet results on the ground vary dramatically and remain, in large part, disappointing. How can some schools sustain high graduation and college acceptance rates while others—with similar school designs, student demographics, and budget constraints—struggle with 50 percent drop-out rates?

The difference can be traced to school leaders' ability to focus their teams on the most important aspects of their school design and to “sweat the details” of execution. Using examples from YES Prep Public Schools, the Knowledge is Power Program, and Envision Schools, this article explores what’s needed to make a strong school design work in practice, including consistent resource allocation, processes that support the design’s intent, and leaders who don’t let immediate pressures—including administrative and operational issues—trump student learning.

Two years into an aggressive expansion plan, Aspire Public Schools was on track in terms of school openings, but behind on its goals to add a layer of management. The schools were performing well, but the nonprofit’s leaders were stretched paper thin and concerned about the organization’s ability to perform in the face of more growth.

Determined to build an organization that could support their expansion plans, the Aspire team took swift action. Their initiatives included:

• Articulating criteria for “healthy growth” that they would use to assess expansion opportunities, thereby incorporating organizational sustainability into any future decisions about growth;
• Addressing a profound anxiety about hiring “outsiders” and delegating responsibilities to an increasingly larger team;
• Defining the boundaries of accountability for each of the organization’s leadership positions;
• Clarifying decision-making authority at a broad level, and making explicit the roles and responsibilities associated with specific and potentially contentious decisions.

Following a number of high-profile successes, The Justice Project (TJP) was awash in opportunities to effect positive change in the criminal justice system. Its leaders, however, were concerned that the organization was in danger of spreading itself too thin. To help clarify which options to pursue, they engaged in the organization’s first formal strategic-planning process.

Taking into account TJP’s strengths and their knowledge of how social change occurs in the criminal justice arena, the leaders set clear goals for a 10-year period. They also developed a set of criteria to use in evaluating opportunities. Finally, they dedicated significant resources to monitoring the pulse of the criminal justice reform environment, to ensure that they would spot high-potential opportunities in a timely way. These actions have helped The Justice Project strike the right balance for its future work: clarifying the organization’s direction and priorities without stifling the flexibility that is so central to its success.