Sustaining Nonprofit Performance: The Case for Capacity Building and the Evidence to Support It

Appendix B. Capacity Building in Low-Income-Serving Children and Family Organizations

Human service organizations have some of the toughest missions in the nonprofit sector. They provide child care for low-income working parents, run after-school programs that build self-esteem, protect children from neglect, provide alternatives for troubled juveniles, and guide the journey for low-income families from welfare to work. In many ways, these nonprofits are America’s other first responders. They often answer the first call for help from America’s most vulnerable citizens and make some of the most difficult choices in society. In an effort to better understand the organizational needs of these nonprofits, the Annie E. Casey Foundation provided additional funding to expand the final sample of lowincome -serving children and family nonprofits by eighty-five, thereby increasing the total sample of nonprofits to 403. Of the 403, 125 met the two basic criteria to be defined as low-income-serving children and family organizations : (1) respondents said that the words “low income” described the people their organization served very well, and (2) they also said the same about the words “children and/or families.” Of the 278 organizations that did not meet this strict test, sixty-two said that the words “low income” described the people their organization served very Appendix B Capacity Building in Low-Income-Serving Children and Family Organizations 191 well, while 107 said the same of “children and/or families.” They simply did not meet both tests. The central purpose of this brief appendix is to ask whether and how low-income-serving children and family nonprofits differ from other nonprofits in their capacity-building activities and success. In a sentence, these organizations shared many organizational characteristics with the rest of the sample, suggesting that capacity building is one of the ties that bind different parts of the sector; however, the respondents reported greater growth in programs and services but lower levels of overall capacity-building success: —36 percent of respondents at the low-income-serving children and family organizations reported a great deal of growth in their programs and services over five years preceding the survey, while 39 percent reported a great deal of growth in the number of clients, compared with 25 and 33 percent of their peers, respectively. —31 percent of the respondents at the low-income-serving children and family organizations reported that their organization’s capacitybuilding effort was somewhat successful or less in improving overall performance , compared with 24 percent of their colleagues. —The respondents at the low-income-serving children and family organizations were also more likely to report that their organization’s effort showed them that change is harder to achieve than they expected and that the effort was stressful for their staff. If the question is what might explain the lower rates of success, the answer is not in the organizational history of capacity building. Indeed, the 125 low-income-serving children and family nonprofits were just as likely as their 278 peers to have engaged in all four areas of organizational improvement: 59 percent of respondents in the first group said their organization had engaged all four areas, compared with 58 percent of the second group. However, when given a list of specific interventions, the 125 organizations were much more likely to report that they had engaged in collaboration (93 versus 94 percent), team building (83 versus 71 percent), recruitment of a more diverse staff (38 versus 23 percent), board development (84 versus 76 percent), leadership development (73 versus 59 percent), new accounting systems (71 versus 58 percent), evaluation (65 versus 59 percent), organizational assessment (60 versus 47 percent), and outcomes measurement (47 versus 42 percent). Except for media 192 APPENDIX B relations, where they trailed their peers 54 to 63 percent, the lowincome -serving children and family organizations had done more work than other nonprofits trying to build the scaffolding of successful organizational improvement. Indeed, of the twenty-three specific interventions listed, 30 percent of the low-income-serving children and family organizations had done more than fifteen, compared with 19 percent of their peers. If these organizations were performing poorly, it was certainly not for lack of trying. Unfortunately, as noted in the body of the book, we cannot know whether these efforts succeeded. There was simply not enough time in the survey to ask questions about every possible past intervention. The low-income-serving children and family organizations also differed from their peers in both what...