Have you ever been asked a tough question that was hard to answer? Imagine if that was asked in a language you didn’t understand? It is difficult enough answering a tough question, but even more so when there is a language barrier.
Instead of just one question between two people imagine all the conversations the ~1,500,000 nonprofits in the United States have. There is no standard vocabulary for the conversations so concepts such as impact, output and outcomes are not universally understood and used. This is a hurdle that needs to be overcome before trying to tackle even more complicated questions. For example what does an outplacement organization mean when they talk about jobs placed? One organization may count the number of people who received a job, while another only counts those who received a job and held it for a certain time period.
Why is this important? If we look at this from a different perspective that may provide some additional insight. Taking the optimistic approach, what if we all spoke the same nonprofit language. A biblical story offers some interesting insight on this.
There is a story of a man named Noah, who builds an ark to save people and animals from a great flood. Where this gets interesting is after the flood all of humanity spoke the same language. People could now work together on a cause and accomplish great things, enabled by their common language. Instead people worked together on the Tower of Bable, to be built to touch the heavens as a showcase of their great skill. As a consequence humanity was scattered across the Earth, a common language was lost.
Tower of Babel (painting by Lucas van Valckenborch)
In the story people are empowered by a common language and can accomplish great things, the group was greater than the sum of its parts. This blog is a start of a discussion on how a common nonprofit language can bring about greater social change in the 21st century. I propose a common nonprofit language can enable nonprofits to increase and improve their collaboration, analysis and available capital. I’ll discuss specific proposals such as the Impact Reporting and Investing Standards (IRIS), while also providing new ideas. I look forward to comments and feedback along the way.
Tags: entrepeneurship, impact, Impact Reporting and Investing Standards, iris, metrics, ngo, non profit, non-profit impact, nonprofit, nonprofit-impact, np impact, six sigma
October 23, 2009 at 9:43 am |
Mike,
Great idea and a definite need to in the non-profit world. Interested to see where this goes. Let me know if you need any material from the field.
Joe