While nonprofits are a great way for people to come together to help out a cause without gaining a profit for themselves, we do see that nonprofits are not always beneficial. While the concept of nonprofits sounds promising, there are few nonprofits that truly work as well as we would like them to and the ones that do work don’t always provide proof. For people to gain trust in the effectiveness of nonprofits organizations need to provide measurement of their work and show their results. By providing measurement, we can see how well a nonprofit is doing which increases our trust in them. A good example of a nonprofit that does this well is PAWS Chicago. PAWS is a Chicago based nonprofit animal shelter that prides itself in providing homeless animals with new homes with loving families as well as saving them from kill shelters.
Here we can see how PAWS is able to measure their organizations effectiveness through volunteer hours, save rates, adoptions, and surgeries. This makes people more likely to do business with PAWS because it shows their success and creates trust. They also provide information regarding why animals are being killed at other shelters and how PAWS is working toward ending that.
Both information that helps people understand the background of the cause and measurement of how the nonprofit has been effective will improve their credibility. Once a nonprofit is able to provide measurements they will bring in more donors which is the main source of funds for most if not all nonprofits. It is one thing to have a strong mission and strong values, but it is another to show the effectiveness of the organization and that can only be shown through measurement. Not have strong they may feel about the cause.