President's statement: creating an online information marketplace  (Page 3/4)

While this information is valuable to any donor, having it readily available online would make it especially valuable to individuals and small foundations with little or no staffto gather it themselves, and it would save each large funder the cost of gathering it separately.

Organizational barriers

While information technology can play an important role in making information of this sort available to donors, the main challenges are not technological, but flow from thenonprofit organizations’ limited time and capacity.

Developing clear goals and strategies makes demands on the time of nonprofit executives, who often are already stretched thin and must make tough choices withlimited resources. Yet for an executive to give an organization’s day-to-day activities higher priority than clarity about its goals and strategies is like an airplane pilot’sdeciding that it is more important to get off the ground and up in the air than to know where he’s going. Most of us would prefer not to be passengers on that flight.

Some executives believe that specifying goals and strategies deprives them of the flexibility to exploit unanticipated opportunities and challenges and, morefundamentally, that it takes the passion out of social change. Of course, organizations must have the flexibility to respond to the unexpected. But it’s one thing to makemidcourse corrections, and quite another to have never charted a course at all. Passion is incredibly important; it’s what makes those committed to social change go to workearly and come home late. But creating actual social change also requires channeling that passion into effective planning and execution.

Nonprofit executives often describe their ambitions in grand terms, but then—like many of us—get caught up in the things they are doing right now, without focusing onthe middle ground of actionable goals. Organizations often have mission statements— along the lines of “End poverty in California” or “Save the rainforest”—that areinspiring but neither realistically attainable nor specific enough to lend themselves to tracking progress. Ultimately, organizations’ missions must be realized through moremundane and specific goals such as “Move 100 residents of South Central Los Angeles into jobs as medical technicians” or “Secure indigenous land rights for 20,000 hectares of tropical forest.” The fault for lack of specificity does not lie solely with granteeorganizations. Many philanthropists are satisfied with lofty missions and inspiring anecdotes—hardly an incentive for nonprofit managers to be clear about their goalsand strategies.

Although designing and implementing strategies can be a daunting task, a nonprofit executive can get assistance from an increasing number of sources. The BridgespanGroup and McKinsey and Company are among the well-known national consulting firms that work with nonprofits, and there are good local ones as well. Innovation Networkand ActKnowledge, with its project Theory of Change, have Internet sites with templates for helping organizations develop strategies. And DonorEdge (describedbelow) assists organizations in articulating the goals and strategies that underlie their programs.