Mastering the Balanced Scorecard

The “balanced scorecard” has been a corporate management buzzword for about a decade. Like many management movements before it, the balanced scorecard is migrating from corporate management into the offices of nonprofit management and development staffing.

Historically, organizations have measured performance primarily with measures derived from financial data. In the 1990s, a group of researchers and consultants from the Nolan Norton Institute began to study commonly used organizational performance measures. Its hypothesis was that organizations were being hindered by these measurement practices because the measurement focus was too narrow.