Nonprofits Are Being Required to Provide Hard Facts to Get Funding

Some local nonprofits, like Big Brothers Big Sisters, get help from a national office, giving them access to a larger data pool and a framework for local data collection.

But at low-budget and grass-roots nonprofits, it's a struggle to satisfy the new demands.

Joy Banish, executive director at Greater Cleveland Volunteers, said her agency (the former RSVP of Greater Cleveland) can produce pages of charts and tables to illustrate accomplishments. Yet her staff is stretched thin because each funder seems to ask for a different slice of data.