Quotes from The Ecomomist Online: Management Reading, What's in the journals, july 2004.

Stanford Social Innovation Review
Summer 2004
“Why Measure?”

Do high-level donors really want to know if a non-profit is performing well? Perhaps not, learned the authors of this article—Katie Cunningham, a director with Teach for America, and Marc Ricks, a policy advisor for New York City—when they interviewed 22 philanthropists who give a collective $50m to charity. While non-profits themselves have become increasingly concerned with performance measurement, the donors don’t see the need; one admitted, “As long as the staff can articulate that they are meeting their goal, I don’t apply the same rigour.” Donors also said they didn’t have time to examine the metrics and didn’t want the charities to be spending precious resources on performance metrics. But the non-profit executives the authors spoke to said they still rely on performance measurements to gauge their progress towards internal goals.

(article downloaded) It's interesting to see this result: non-profit organizations are working hard on measuring their performances, but their customers don't care about their performance. Will it be the same at the educational institute? This article briefly explains the differences between measurement and evaluation. It is a nice reminder that I may have confused and thought that these two are the same.

Look back at my June 03 post about using BSC to evaluate design studio, is this idea valid? What's my purpose of using BSC? Do I just use BSC as a mean to get to some concrete evaluation criteria?