Report Reveals Widespread Efforts by U.S. Nonprofits to Innovate, Measure Program Effectiveness

The vast majority of the nation's nonprofits are engaging in efforts to innovate and measure program effectiveness, a new report from the Johns Hopkins Listening Post Project finds.

Based on a survey of more than four hundred nonprofits working in the fields of children and family services, elderly housing and services, community and economic development, and the arts, the report, Nonprofits, Innovation, and Performance Measurement: Separating Fact From Fiction (26 pages, PDF), found that 82 percent of respondents reported implementing an innovative program or service within the past five years. This was particularly true among larger organizations, challenging the common assumption that organizations become less innovative as they grow in size. The report also found that more than two-thirds of respondents reported having at least one innovation in the past two years that they wanted to adopt but were unable to, with 86 percent of those respondents blaming a lack of funding for their inability to do so.