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I agree with Laura that most nonprofits are staffed by passionate and well-meaning people, and that funders should not necessarily limit themselves to funding high performing organizations. I would argue, though, that when a funder or donor chooses to invest in an organization that is not high performing, that investment should be made specifically to build performance management capacity. If we continue to invest in other ways in organizations that neither are, nor intend to become, high performing, there will be no incentive for nonprofits to change. The only way more organizations will become high performing is if funders are more likely to fund high performing organizations and nonprofits know that it is the only way for them to be competitive. Ingvild Bjornvold

Paula - Thanks for sharing David Hunter's advice, and for encouraging comment. To respond, I'll need to put on two different hats. The first hat is a small funder hat. My husband and I recently founded the Pluff Mud Connect service which includes making small gifts of $1,000 to local nonprofit organizations in the Lowcountry and we just made our first five gifts in August. We call these our Thrive! Prizes. I definitely agree with David's first point about investing in organizations and we chose specifically to fund only small infrastructure or capacity-building projects in lieu of funding programs. As to point number two, we certainly knew that our small contributions wouldn't solve the root causes of poverty, but were glad that they could instead help at a more fundamental level like helping build web-based capacity, funding the printing of outreach tools, and giving a struggling organization a chance to revise its governance structure. These are just a few examples, but you can see already that our approach differed a bit from what David suggests. With the help of our 150+ member community, we intentionally gave money to organizations across the spectrum of what might be considered "effective" and we chose to give five $1000 gifts instead of giving one $5,000 gift intentionally as well. Why? To explain, I probably need to put on my other hat, which involves my background in the nonprofit sector. Most of my career has been spent either as a leader within nonprofit organizations, or as a consultant who has been in the position of rescuing "non-high-performing" organizations, and I've developed a passionate commitment for the small, and often struggling nonprofit organizations that haven't yet reached high performance. I understand the call for donors to shift their funding away from these struggling organizations, but I just don't believe that Darwinian "survival of the fittest" is the only way to benefit the sector. It just doesn't have to be that black and white or that cut-throat. Donors can fund high-performing organizations and at the same time work to build the capacity of those who just aren't "there" yet. Donors can insist that their gifts to less effective nonprofits who still have really important missions be used to build capacity instead of withdrawing support. And that can be done with low transaction costs, support for outcome measurement, and ongoing advocacy. I may be in the minority here, but I believe that most nonprofits, whether currently effective or not, were started and are still staffed by well-meaning people who care passionately about important missions. Let's encourage funders to provide the ones who aren't yet high performing with coaching, training and capacity building instead of pulling out completely. And, let's encourage the leaders in high-performing nonprofits to engage in collaboration, dialogue, and potentially even merger with those less-effective nonprofits so that they are also helping to build that capacity. There isn't any reason that we can't work to lift the entire sector at once. If we don't, we've failed to harness the power and commitment of the struggling boards, the floundering leaders, and the passionate program staff and volunteers who want to be high performing but don't know how to get there. I see that as a huge missed opportunity and a tremendous waste of the "human" resources already invested in the sector. Thanks again for the opportunity to share a different perspective, Laura Laura Deaton | Pluff Mud Connect | (888) 784-3433 (phone and fax) | laura@pluffmudconnect.com (email) |www.PluffMudConnect.com |"Helping Lowcountry Nonprofits Thrive" |Twitter:@pluffmudconnect p.s. I really did put paragraph breaks in...but from the preview, it looks like this may post as one long block. My apologies if that ends up being the case!