Giving Compass' Take:

• In this profile, Mario Morino, founder of  Leap of Reason Ambassadors Community, encourages foundations and nonprofits to build strong bonds to achieve social progress through effective programs. 

• The articles offers seven ways to ensure a nonprofit is effective, including a culture that values learning and adaptive leadership. What factors do you consider most important?

• Read about the benefits of collaborative philanthropy. 

Mario Morino would soon turn 70. For a blue-collar kid from Cleveland, he had done very well for himself. He had made a fortune in the software industry and given a lot of it away — about $40 million, he estimates. He had helped pioneer venture philanthropy, an approach to charitable giving modeled on venture capital. He had written a book called Leap of Reason, urging nonprofits “to create more meaningful, measurable good.”

“There are too many nonprofits,” Morino says, “that are just not doing enough to ensure they’re making a positive difference.”

This was 2013.

Beginning with a handful of collaborators, Morino gradually persuaded dozens of leaders of nonprofits and foundations to form an organization known, inelegantly, as the Leap of Reason Ambassadors Community.

Five years later, the by-invitation-only group, which operates mostly by email and phone, has about 160 members. Together they have produced thousands of words, recorded many hours of videos, and built an extensive set of tools, all designed to help themselves and their peers build, evaluate, and sustain what they call high-performance organizations.

The Leap community is designed to attack on all three fronts. True to their name, the ambassadors are expected to evangelize for better, outcomes focused management. They argue, too, that donors should support their grantees’ learning and improvement. And they have collectively developed content to spread the word and tools to drive high performance.

They went on to build a framework called the Performance Imperative, aka the PI, which includes seven principles touching on the role of leadership and boards and the need for external evaluation.

The following are the seven key factors that ensure a nonprofit is effective, according to the Leap Ambassadors Community:

  1. Courageous, Adaptive Executive and Board Leadership
  2. Disciplined, People-Focused Management
  3. Well-Designed and Well-Implemented Programs and Strategies
  4. Financial Health and Sustainability
  5. A Culture That Values Learning
  6. Internal Monitoring for Continuous Improvement
  7. External Evaluation for Mission Effectiveness

Learn more about the impact evangelist by Marc Gunther at Leap of Reason Ambassadors Community