Executive Issues in Nonprofits Study: Identifying Enablers of Nonprofit High Performance -- Summary

To help nonprofits keep pace with the changing marketplace, Accenture leveraged the research power of our High Performance Business initiative to develop a blueprint of the challenges facing nonprofits and identify solutions for overcoming them.

Our Executive Issues in Nonprofits study, released in 2006, found that fundraising—and survival—are top-of-mind issues for nonprofit executives. In a survey of more than 200 nonprofit executive directors and board members, 77 percent of executives identified expanding the donor base as their primary concern. But as nonprofits maintain this intense focus on fundraising, most organizations represented in the survey appeared to be overlooking opportunities to improve their own operations and more effectively leverage the funding they do have.

Accenture research found that nonprofits could achieve higher levels of performance by embracing basic business practices and tools that can help them use their money more effectively, ensure their sustainability and make bigger impacts on the communities and people they serve. The report recommends specific actions that nonprofits can take to improve their operations and address the internal and external challenges they face.

Michelle Nunn, CEO and founder of Hands On Network, described the importance of building the capacity of nonprofit organizations. "I think there is sometimes a misunderstanding that nonprofits can use volunteers effectively without investing in infrastructure—namely, staff capacity to help recruit and manage volunteers and orchestrate their work. Without that infrastructure, most nonprofits will never have enough staff to scale up their volunteer activities. Almost all nonprofits say that they would use more volunteers if they had more organizational capacity to manage them."

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