Professors Discuss Role of Nonprofits

A host of Harvard professors, Kennedy School fellows, and nonprofit leaders gathered yesterday in the Hauser Center to discuss the difficulties of managing a nonprofit organization.

The event, entitled “Tensions and Trade-Offs for Nonprofit Leaders,” was led by visiting Associate Professor of Public Policy Alnoor S. Ebrahim.

Ebrahim, a professor at Virginia Tech, explored the relationship between external accountability—the obligation nonprofits feel to report data to their funders—and internal learning—the usefulness of data within the organization.

Ebrahim, who drew on his recent research in Washington D.C. for this lecture, said he plans to expand the project to Boston later this year.

In D.C., Ebrahim said he placed three of his graduate students in three different nonprofits: a meal program, a drop-in center, and a housing service for domestic violence victims.

Ebrahim said he focused his work on homelessness because it raised unique problems, including a highly mobile client population and an array of mental health and substance abuse issues.

“These factors make it hard to measure short-term outputs and long-term outcomes, which makes it all the more intriguing and important,” he said.

From the data he gathered, Ebrahim hypothesized that organizational learning is more likely to occur if staff perceive evaluation as central to their own jobs and if error is embraced as a learning opportunity.

He explored these theories via surveys of 62 D.C. nonprofit directors.

The room’s experts raised some concerns with Ebrahim’s data. Most agreed that in terms of learning from mistakes, Ebrahim needed to identify various types of error.

Herman “Dutch” B. Leonard, a Kennedy School public management professor, stressed at the event the difference between what he called “excusable and inexcusable ignorance.”

“Not knowing something that you had no way of knowing is different from not knowing something because you hadn’t bothered to find out,” he said.

Kennedy school research fellow Katya F. Smyth ’93 countered that there may not be a chance to make this distinction.

“In environments of extreme resource scarcity, all anyone sees is that you screwed up,” she said. “There may be room within an organization to parse out these differences, but the larger climate may not care.”

Ebrahim said that one of the biggest obstacles for nonprofits is their reliance on numbers to assess success.

Ebrahim concluded his speech with a quote from Einstein to highlight this “general bias”:

“Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.”