The diagnostic · under development
The diagnostic under development.
The meta-analysis is complete. The instrument is in active design, shaped with nonprofit leaders, funders, and board members. What follows is what it will do.
The problem the instrument addresses
When a corporation's governance falters, the effect eventually registers in its share price, however imperfectly. A nonprofit has no comparable signal. Its governance can strengthen or erode with no continuous indication of whether it is advancing the mission or working against it.
This is not for lack of information. Boards already track a great deal. Each existing instrument, though, misses the governance function itself:
Financial and performance reports
Track outputs and spending, not how the organization is governed.
Periodic board self-assessments
Capture the board's view of itself, at intervals, with no other party consulted.
Post-meeting surveys
Ask whether the meeting ran well, not whether the governance is sound.
No existing instrument measures governance continuously, from more than one perspective, and against a benchmark. The diagnostic is built to do exactly that.
Three perspectives, examined together
Most governance self-assessments capture a single point of view. The diagnostic will gather three. Each group will be asked only what it can validly assess.
Perspective one
Executive director
Reports on how the organization is structured and led.
Perspective two
The board
Reports on its own engagement and accountability.
Perspective three
Community served
Reports on program delivery and on whether it holds any formal authority in decisions.
Read together
The analytical work lies in reading the three accounts together and identifying where they diverge, since a single-perspective instrument cannot surface divergence of that kind.
Board members, staff, and the community served hold distinct and often divergent views of how a mission is best fulfilled. A shared measure gives them common ground to reason from, rather than a contest of perspectives to litigate.
Dimensions the instrument will assess
The diagnostic will assess five dimensions of how an organization is governed in practice.
Power
Who approves what, and whether the distribution of power is explicit, documented, and understood by all.
Accountability
What real mechanisms hold the board, the staff, and the organization to account.
Community stakeholders
Whether the people served hold any formal power over governance, priorities, budgets, and leadership decisions.
Mission execution
Whether recruitment, agendas, committees, and time actually serve the mission.
Staff and board partnership
Each side's real experience of the other, and the turnover and burnout it produces.
Patterns the measurement surfaces
Governance dysfunction tends to follow recognizable patterns. These are documented in the meta-analysis and familiar to most people who have served on a board. Measurement makes them visible early, while they can still be corrected.
Rubber stamp
The board approves what management proposes without the scrutiny its role requires.
Micromanaging
The board reaches past governance into daily operations, blurring the line between oversight and management.
Balkanized
Committees, staff, and board factions pursue separate agendas, and the organization loses a shared direction.
Phantom
The board exists on paper but does little actual governing, leaving the organization without real oversight.
Community-blind
The board decides without the knowledge held by the people it serves, so signals of success can hide a decline in actual delivery. The case study shows how this happens.
Isomorphic compliance
The organization copies corporate governance forms, such as the policies adopted after the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, that were built for conditions nonprofits do not face. The result is documentation and compliance without effective governance.
Evidentiary grounding
Its questions will be drawn from a synthesis of more than 50 sources including peer-reviewed studies, academic journals, practitioner analysis, sector reports, and government data rather than from any single practitioner's judgment of good practice.
Why we are building it.
The sector comprises 1.9 million organizations and supports more than 140 million Americans who rely on it for food, housing, healthcare, and education. When governance misaligns with mission, resources intended for those communities are lost, and the loss is rarely detected while it is still correctable.
Our purpose is to move the sector forward, not to critique the people who sustain it. An accessible, evidence-based assessment is intended to return resources to mission.
A measure, not a mandate.
We do not recommend that organizations abandon the traditional board model, nor do we advocate for any single governance structure. Governance architecture that serves one organization well can undermine another. Our aim is to give each organization a clear, evidence-based view of how it is currently governed, so that its leaders can determine whether that architecture is advancing the mission or inhibiting it. The conclusions belong to the organization.
Current status of the work
The instrument is being developed in consultation with the practitioners who will use it. Organizations and individuals with an interest in a credible measure of nonprofit governance are invited to contribute to its design at this stage.
The meta-analysis
The diagnostic is grounded in the research.
Read the meta-analysis the five dimensions are built on.
Read the meta-analysis