Measuring a Non-Profit’s Success
What is a non-profit’s bottom-line? Many non-profit watchdog organizations use financial data from the non-profit’s IRS 990’s filed year to year, to measure the financial strength, efficiency and capacity of a non-profit.
This gives a potential donor good background information, but is it enough?
At Miracle Flights for Kids, we take tremendous pride in being extremely efficient and mindful of how we spend the generous donations that make our mission possible. At the end of the day, as we improve our efficiency we will be able to provide more flights for sick kids for our donor’s dollar.
Yet equally important is the type of service we are providing. Many of our flights are literally life-saving. If an urgent flight request is made to save a child’s life and an immediate response means more money is spent on that particular flight, our efficiency may suffer. However, we also saved a child’s life!
Unfortunately, there are still no metrics in place among the many non-profit watchdog organizations to take the value of our service into account. We may well let our overall efficiency suffer in order to save a child’s life, and therefore see their overall non-profit efficiency rating drop.
In addition to financial statistics, we need non-profit watchdogs to expand their rating systems.
“How many children’s lives did you save this year?” is never a question we are asked. Yet shouldn’t it be the first?
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When it’s your child, it’s the only question on your mind.