La misurazione dei risultati delle organizzazioni nonprofit

The role of nonprofit organizations in the global economy is increasingly bigger. Also in Italy the number of organizations, carrying on business activities without any purpose of profit, is raising. During the last twenty years, the crisis of the Italian welfare state forced the Italian government to devolve to private organizations a lot of service regarding, especially, social services, education, healthcare. In this devolution’s process, nonprofit organizations are playing a central role because of their nonprofit purposes. The Italian State, in order to promote the development of nonprofit organizations, has provided several fiscal incentives either for nonprofit organizations or for people donating to these organizations. But, these incentives represents an “investment” for the society, so that the demand for some measures of results is increasingly higher. Researchers and academics from all over the world have traditionally focused their attention on issues related to the management of for profit organizations. But, during the last thirty years, some researchers have turned their attention to the nonprofit sector, developing a specific field of study. At the beginning, the efforts of researchers were directed to transfer to nonprofit organizations management rules and processes conceived for for profit organizations. But this efforts proved not be useful for nonprofit organizations due to the different nature of these organizations. In particular, the measurement of results of nonprofit organizations is definitely more complicated due to the lack of results expressed in monetary terms. So the management control processes and tools conceived for for profit organizations are quite useless for nonprofit organizations. Researchers have tried to overcome this problem creating several indicators of results based on some measures of outcome. But these indicators permit significant comparison only among organizations operating in the same sector and they are usually problematic to manage. In order to review the “state of the art” in the management control processes applied to nonprofit organizations, I spent four months, during 2007 and 2009, in NYC as visiting scholar at Columbia Business School. There, I had the chance to interview some professional working for nonprofit organizations operating in the field of social services in the city of New York. From those meeting I learnt that the smaller organizations haven’t enough resources to implement and to maintain any management control process. In the bigger organizations, like Robin Hood Foundation, I could see a very sophisticated process for the measurement of results based on the translation of results in monetary terms. This systems appears like an interesting point of departure in order to develop an evaluating system for Italian nonprofit organizations.