I've been reading Jim Collin's distinguished book,
Good to Great, and the accompanying monograph
Good to Great and the Social Sectors.
He makes an important point for all of us involved in any social sector organization: knowing how to assess and separate our inputs from out outputs. Too many of us make the mistake of assessing our performance by assuming our inputs are the same as our outputs. For example, most people analyzing a non-profit with a high percentage of its budget allocated for administrative, fund raising, and salary costs would think that this group is performing poorly since not enough money is not going to its "mission". The problem with this analysis is that for social sector groups money is an input not an output. Therefore, it is possible for an organization, such as a community's orchestra group, to have relatively high admin costs, but to produce stellar musical shows, attract large audiences, change the morale of a community, be invited to exclusive festivals, etc.
In this case, the outputs for the orchestra group would be measured by the quality of music, show attendance, impact on community feeling, etc. Therefore, according to these measures they would be fulfilling their mission. If each community group could develop a set of quantitative and/or qualitative output measurements to assess their ability to fulfill their mission, then this would be a better gauge of whether high input costs such as money for administrative purposes are justified.
