Nonprofit Benchmarking Book Review
By Tom Wilson Major Gifts Guru
I wrote a series of articles earlier this year about benchmarking for fundraising and included a review of Gary Hubbell's new book. In listening to Gary present at a CASE regional conference he mentioned the Keehley & Abercrombie book Benchmarking in the Public and Nonprofit Sectors: Best Practices for Achieving Performance Breakthroughs, 2nd edition.My personal goal is to review one book a month for you. While vacationing in Hawaii over spring break I did some beach reading, so here's the review.
The first edition was focused on the public sector: governmental agencies. This edition goes into nonprofit practices and particularly notes a unique nonprofit style of quick "solution-driven benchmarking."
I recommend this book for those of us who want to understand benchmarking better. For the public sector (5 stars *****), for the nonprofit executive (4 stars ****), for the major gifts fundraiser (3 stars ***) only after reading Gary Hubbell's book.
The authors make the point that corporate benchmarking came out of the TQM (total quality management) movement created by Edward Deming (one of my heros). To help determine quality measures, Xerox created benchmarking measures to help detect and implement best practices from some of their manufacturing units to the entire company.
Traditional benchmarking takes 11 steps and significant resources. Nonprofit solution-driven fundraising cuts this back to 5 steps and can be done by 1 brave leader.
The authors capture the trend of corporate benchmarking (20 to 30 years old) transferring to public benchmarking around the re-engineering government movement of the mid 1990s. The next frontier will be nonprofit organizations (hospitals are starting to see this big time as evidenced by the major benchmarking initiative launched by AHP a few years ago).
If the mantra for real estate is location, location, location . . . and the mantra for major gift fundraising is cultivation, cultivation, cultivation . . . then the mantra for benchmarking is measure measure, measure.
The other themes are discovering best practices and finding a partnering organization to learn in depth what they are doing well and why.
The 5 steps for nonprofit solution-driven benchmarking are:
- 1) Discover the problem
- 2) Establish criteria for solutions
- 3) Search for promising practices
- 4) Implement promising practices
- 5) Monitor progress
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http://majorgiftsguru.com/2009/04/nonprofit-benchmarking-book-review.html
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