When I meet with team members of any non-profit I work with, the first question I ask them is, “What’s the mission?” I truly want to know. I want to know how they’ll respond. I’m curious if they will have an answer. What I’m hoping for is a quick answer in their very own words. Incidentally, this is rare.
Here’s what I’m used to hearing:
- A very long pause.
- And then, “Do you mean for this meeting?”
- Or, “Well, I guess it’s …,” which is answered in the form of a question.
And then one time in about 25, I’ll get a great answer like Nathan’s, “Mark, we walk with people as long as we need to.” That was the right response for me because I already had the general idea. Accordingly, he personalized it. No, he nailed it.
But I’m not done yet. When I ask about the mission, I like to follow up with, “How do you know?” As in, what are the results of this organization? Generally, long pauses, or as one operations director once said, “Mark, that’s a great question.”
And that’s the purpose of this brief discussion: performance monitoring and tracking in the nonprofit. Confession: I hate financial meetings that I don’t lead in any nonprofit. That even includes board sessions where I’ll typically excuse myself because the focus is all wrong. Plus, we should spend 95% of our time talking about the mission and its results, and very little on finance unless we’re terrible at raising funds or spending money foolishly. That’s never been the case in my limited experiences with the nonprofits I’ve worked with.
Before moving on, let me lay some groundwork so that you’ll know where I’m coming from. When I think of non-profits, I just can’t shake Peter Drucker from my mind. I keep hearing him in my ears shouting, “Mark, it’s the results, stupid; it’s the results.”
Incidentally, I am taking some writer’s liberties with slight dramatization because I doubt Peter Drucker ever shouted at his students and clients. The word “stupid” probably wasn’t in his dictionary either. The bigger point is ensuring we have a non-profit leadership team that fulfills its mission with clear, identifiable results.
And that leads me to the organization PAWS Chicago. About once a week, I try to study one non-profit, reviewing its mission and the performance results it reports. PAWS Chicago is a great case study on this topic.
Performance Results at PAWS Chicago
Transcript (Edited for clarity and readability)
I recently asked Google’s Gemini to give me about a dozen nonprofit organizations that align well with performance and mission. It happened to pick PAWS Chicago near the top, so I clicked on it first.
I’m amazed at the number of volunteer hours they are showing on the home page. Those hours equate to about 60 full-time equivalents; I wish they would report that number instead.
Next is the save rate, which is shy of 100 percent. That save rate will make more sense when I show you the mission statement later.
Next are the 2025 adoptions and the number of surgeries for that year, which is pushing 22,000.
Mission Statement
The mission statement is to build no-kill communities. I have a pet, so I didn’t really understand that at first, but I understand this: to end the overpopulation of homeless animals and, ultimately, to transform animal welfare.
As we scroll further on this page, you’ll see their core values or their guiding principles.
Performance
Let’s turn our attention to performance. And this is where I think this organization shines. I’m not going to get into the weeds because they have a lot of PDF documents on their website. They happen to include performance by year, which I think is just absolutely brilliant.
Instead, as we scroll down this page, we learn that the organization has found more than 4,900 new homes for these animals and nearly 92,000 homes since its inception.
Here are some more relevant numbers:
- More than 21,000 spay/neuter surgeries
- Almost 98% of the animals entering their program have been saved
- Volunteers work 125,000 hours, an equivalent of 60 full-time staff members
- The number of foster families exceeded 2,200
To quickly summarize, I call this a very nice match of performance with mission in a nonprofit.
The Logic Model
These actions and results remind me of the nonprofit logic model of inputs, actions, outputs, and outcomes.
- Inputs – the investments and resources needed to do the work
- Actions – the work itself
- Outputs – the tangible results of actions
- Outcomes – short-term or long-term transformations from outputs
In the case of PAWS, the outcome of their work has been overt, not to mention remarkable. Paws started in 1997, which happened to be the apex of pet euthanasia, with more than 42,000 animals. By 2022, that number is down to around 4,200. That is a remarkable outcome.
Drucker’s Five Most Important Questions
This website reminds me of Peter Drucker’s five most important questions. He shares a great quote near the beginning of this short book:
For years, most nonprofits felt that good intentions were by themselves enough, but today we know that, because we don’t have a bottom line, we have to manage better than a for-profit business.
Peter Drucker, The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization
His solution for the nonprofit is to respond and act on the following five questions:
- What is our mission?
- Who is our customer?
- What does the customer value?
- What are our results?
- What is our plan?
Please customize these questions to your organization. Swap out customer for student, recipient, or client. In number three, I prefer ‘want’ over value.
I like that last question, and here is a practical way to apply it in one-to-one meetings or weekly staff meetings:
- What’s the plan?
- What’s your progress?
- What are the problems?
Does PAWS Measure Up?
Let’s go back to my original research. I was looking for a nonprofit where performance pairs nicely with the mission.
Did they get it right? Does performance and mission pair well in your mind? I have a second question. If you are working with a nonprofit, does it do a great job at pairing performance with its mission?
Not All Nonprofit Performance Can be Easily Measured
Remember the logic model of inputs, actions, outputs, and outcomes? Rightly or wrongly, I tend to put nonprofits in one to two different camps. One is transactional; the other is transformational.
One is not better than the other. The distinguishing factor is measurement. For instance, I find it easy to measure the performance of PAWS Chicago. While the founders will call their work transformational, and I’d never argue against that, their performance results are transactional: a saved puppy, a new adopted home, a surgery. Easy to measure or count.
In other cases, nonprofits change lives, and there may be cases where the work goes on for years well after the nonprofit has served that Peter Drucker customer. How do you measure performance where the outcome is transformational and hard to pin down when the transformation takes place?
Accordingly, I perceive the above applies most to transactional-centric mission statements. But if you are in the transformation business, still look for ways to pair your performance with your mission.
