Over the past several decades, a number of different critiques of nonprofit work have emerged.  Inevitably, these critiques have a strong basis — they identify real and specific issues in how nonprofits work — but collectively they may present a problem by calling for approaches that aren’t easily reconciled. That's happening in the current moment with the tension between 1) the call of the evidence-based practice approach for rigorous evaluation and theory development; 2) the "new philanthropy" emphasis on trust-based management structures and long-term planning; and 3) the entrepreneurial approach to iterative work. Each of these perspectives brings something valuable to nonprofit work, but they don't sit easily with each other. In the work of our foundation, One Earth Future (OEF), we've developed one way of bridging these three approaches. This model may be useful for other nonprofits, if funders are willing to support it.

One dominant force in modern nonprofit work is the call for strong evidence. Despite its prevalence, the modern focus on "evidence-based practice" is only a little more than twenty years old, growing out of a mid-1990s emphasis on better structuring learning in government and social impact work. The movement has been incredibly impactful, undeniably improving some specific programs and arguably improving the ability of social impact work overall to deliver effective results. The 2019 Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to development economists Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer for their impact in driving the approach.

Alongside these successes, the heavy emphasis on strong theories of change and strict monitoring and evaluation (M&E) structures has been criticized for a funding model that treats nonprofit efforts as bounded and discrete projects that can be quickly started or stopped, rather than as an ongoing engagement that is informed and adapted accordingly by M&E within a complex system.

Read the full article about KEYWORD by Conor Seyle and Marcel Arsenault at PhilanTopic.