When I first started looking for non-profit management courses in the late 1990s, only a few business schools offered any (I ended up going to the Harvard Business School week-long course). Today, only fifteen years later, there are enough masters degrees in non-profit management that US News and World Report offers a ranking of the best schools - Indiana, Syracuse, Minnesota, Washington (WA) and New York were the top five - http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-public-affairs-schools/nonprofit-management-rankings). In other words, universities have discovered a rich new vein of fees-paying students. So there are now numerous educational opportunities for people wishing to learn the intricacies of non-profit management but there are still many areas where educational offerings fall short and helpful research findings are non-existent. For example, setting up, expanding and managing an international NGO is still an exercise in frustration and mistakes because there is so little guidance on how one should deal with the issues of governance, strategy development and implementation, human resources and the like from one country to another.
On the M&E front, there is a great deal of attention being given to measuring impact and to the development of sophisticated management information systems for the non-profit world but there is a dearth of real-life examples that convincingly identify NGO impact. Globally, Gapfinder shows impressive trends in the reduction of the number of women per children, an increase in life expectancy and improved health measures but tying those trends to the activities of any single NGO or group of NGOs is still more of an art form than a science.
I am hopeful that we will begin to see the many educational institutions in the field begin to churn out data-driven conclusions on effective management, effective fund-raising strategies and effective campaigning and program delivery but the field is probably still too new (and research effort too poorly funded) to see much change in the foreseeable future. In the meantime I will continue to search for useful benchmark information and conduct my own research (growth in animal protection funding in the US has increased from $4.94 to $10.76 per capita in just the past ten years) to inform management decision-making.
COMMENTS
BY Andrew Rowan
ON June 4, 2015 12:38 PM
When I first started looking for non-profit management courses in the late 1990s, only a few business schools offered any (I ended up going to the Harvard Business School week-long course). Today, only fifteen years later, there are enough masters degrees in non-profit management that US News and World Report offers a ranking of the best schools - Indiana, Syracuse, Minnesota, Washington (WA) and New York were the top five - http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-public-affairs-schools/nonprofit-management-rankings). In other words, universities have discovered a rich new vein of fees-paying students. So there are now numerous educational opportunities for people wishing to learn the intricacies of non-profit management but there are still many areas where educational offerings fall short and helpful research findings are non-existent. For example, setting up, expanding and managing an international NGO is still an exercise in frustration and mistakes because there is so little guidance on how one should deal with the issues of governance, strategy development and implementation, human resources and the like from one country to another.
On the M&E front, there is a great deal of attention being given to measuring impact and to the development of sophisticated management information systems for the non-profit world but there is a dearth of real-life examples that convincingly identify NGO impact. Globally, Gapfinder shows impressive trends in the reduction of the number of women per children, an increase in life expectancy and improved health measures but tying those trends to the activities of any single NGO or group of NGOs is still more of an art form than a science.
I am hopeful that we will begin to see the many educational institutions in the field begin to churn out data-driven conclusions on effective management, effective fund-raising strategies and effective campaigning and program delivery but the field is probably still too new (and research effort too poorly funded) to see much change in the foreseeable future. In the meantime I will continue to search for useful benchmark information and conduct my own research (growth in animal protection funding in the US has increased from $4.94 to $10.76 per capita in just the past ten years) to inform management decision-making.