Because It’s Not Enough Just To Believe You’re Helpful

Posted on Apr 30, 2012 | 4 Comments

Cutting defense spending is hard enough. But we also suffer from a “social services-industrial complex” that may be even harder to cut.

So asserted Daniel Stid, a partner at the nonprofit consultancy the Bridgespan Group, in a recent piece for the Washington Post.

“The dirty little secret of the social sector is that once government money starts flowing, the nonprofits that have advocated for it and/or who are benefitting from it have a vested interest in keeping it going, even as evidence shows ‘weak or no positive effects,’” Stid wrote.

That, of course, is never a good thing. But it’s especially troubling at a time when budgets are so tight. “In a time of mounting austerity, the only practical way to direct more public funding to what works is to reallocate it from what doesn’t work,” Stid argued. “But this challenges the status quo and is thus politically much more fraught.

That nonprofits and other service institutions barrel on despite lacking evidence of effectiveness isn’t news. As we’ve talked about, Peter Drucker felt that nonprofits, not just businesses, must learn to measure outcomes and abandon what’s not working.

Photo credit: Krissy Venosdale

But when government is involved, and the organization is large, that can be especially hard to do. “The public service agency is always in danger of frittering away its best people as well as a great deal of money on activities which no longer produce, no longer contribute, have proven to be incapable of producing, or are simply inappropriate,” Drucker noted in Toward the Next Economics. “Unless results can be appraised objectively, there will be no results. There will only be activity, that is, costs.”

Because government programs, or government-sponsored programs, can be nearly impossible to kill, Drucker therefore advocated killing them in advance.

“Instead of starting with the assumption that any program, any agency, and any activity is likely to be eternal, we might start out with the opposite assumption: that each is short-lived and temporary,” Drucker proposed in the Age of Discontinuity. “We might, from the beginning, assume that it will come to an end within five or 10 years unless specifically renewed. And we may discipline ourselves not to renew any program unless it has the results that it promised when first started.”

What do you think is the best way to get rid of federal spending on non-performing social services?

4 Comments

Irv Katz
May 3, 2012
One of the major flaws in Stid’s argument is the assumption that programs are not evaluated. Many may not be but the government funds a lot of evaluations and provider agencies themselves, often with help from foundations, evaluate programs. EBP–evidence based practice–is the word not just of the moment but dating back twenty years ago when the Urban Institute and United Way of America began to share methods of outcome planning and measurement, methods that have been integrated into the daily practices of countless organizations. Nonprofit providers share Drucker’s belief in measuring outcomes and abandoning that which is not working. In the wake of the deep economic crisis of a few years ago, for example, astute providers did not cut across the board. They assessed everything and discarded what was not working or was not funded. And it is not solely the effectiveness of programs that affects a provider’s service mix. it is also the vagaries of funding, particularly government funding; mentoring here today, there tomorrow, maybe nowhere the next day. The real problem is twofold: there is a lack of rational policy and strategies for achieving desired outcomes across government programs and bureauscracies; and there is really bad decision making by elected officials. Evaluations of the DARE anti-drug program some years ago found it ineffective and yet countless local schools and jurisdictions continued to fund the program. And don’t tell me that service providers and parents alone successfully fought the elimination of Head Start. Some of the research that asserted it was ineffective was questioned and two parties were at idealogical loggerheads, one having a slight advantage in this case.
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william patrick leonard
May 5, 2012
Sunset clauses also give the program supporters ample lead time to tweak their outcome reports and marshal their allies. Self reported outcomes are inherently problematic. Look at the many colleges found to have gamed U. S. News and World Report’s Best Colleges data in recernt years. Without an objective third party generating the performance data, sunsets are flawed from the start. Building in with funding a third party assessor could be a start in the right direction.
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John Leonard
May 10, 2012
In his op-ed, Mr. Stid succeeded at being clever and provocative. I don’t believe he really intended to shed much light on nonprofit operations, evaluation or success in reaching goals and mission. I certainly hope he didn’t — because he didn’t even come close to providing the light to go along with his heat.
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Emanuel Keyes
June 14, 2012
De’fund and don’t let it come up under a new name……….like acorn
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