Editors’ Note: Aaron Horvath introduces the argument behind his recent article in American Journal of Sociology, “Organizational Supererogation and the Transformation of Nonprofit Accountability.”

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the nonprofit sector experienced a crisis of accountability. News of fraud, overpaid executives, and other misdeeds fueled popular anxieties over whether nonprofits were misusing donors’ funds, abusing their legal privileges, or making progress on the causes they claimed to pursue. Scrambling to restore faith in the sector, regulators, funders, and other nonprofit leaders proposed a raft of formal oversight requirements. Several states passed regulatory measures mandating audits and expanded disclosures. Rating agencies like Charity Navigator took advantage of nonprofits’ newly digitized tax returns, using them to compute financial ratios and assign scores for organizational trustworthiness. And foundations—keen to ensure grantees were accomplishing funders’ aims—demanded outcome measurement and intensive program evaluations.

To proponents, this new evaluative regime would ensure that nonprofits were, as one report put it, “ethical, responsible stewards of Americans’ generosity.” To critics, however, the changes threatened to cause serious harm to the organizational infrastructure of civil society. For one, the growing emphasis on short-term, easily measured, and intervention-specific results would likely crowd out hard-to-quantify civic goals like advocacy, public participation, and community building. Evaluation would also impart a transactional character to the warm and meaningful relationships between nonprofit workers and the people they serve. And amid efforts to create “universally agreed upon best practices” and “common standards of excellence” (in the words of Paul Brest), some critics worried that the organizationally diverse sector was on the brink of a sweeping reorientation—with mission drift and homogenization the anticipated result. 

Critics’ fears were warranted, at least as far as sociological theory is concerned. Indeed, as sociologists have demonstrated time and again, evaluative pressures do not merely capture organizations as they are, they shape what matters to organizations and, in so doing, shape the organizations themselves. When organizations fixate on the criteria by which they are judged, they can lose sight of their distinctive missions and conform their activities to externally legitimated molds. Insofar as a vibrant civil society depends on organizational pluralism, the prospect of widespread convergence is unsettling. If received sociological wisdom held, formal evaluation might have purged nonprofits of their distinctiveness and sapped the sector of its eclectic soul. 

As a member of the Civic Life of Cities Lab at Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, I’ve been following how 200 randomly sampled nonprofits from the San Francisco Bay Area—a region that includes the urban centers of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose as well as the more rural counties of Sonoma, Solano, and Santa Cruz. To understand how this diverse set of organizations has responded to their evolving evaluative environment, I’ve used data from interviews, surveys, and content analyses of nonprofit webpages and other public documents. My findings: contrary to the expectations of sociological theory, nonprofits have neither forsaken their missions nor converged around narrow evaluative frameworks. Surprisingly, nonprofits have not only complied with external accountability demands, they’ve surpassed them by innovating new approaches to accountability, disclosing more information than was ever required, and doing so in ways that reflect the distinctive and locally meaningful nature of their work. 

This enthusiastic embrace of accountability came in many forms. In some cases, nonprofits tailored ill-fitting performance criteria to better suit their missions and hired independent analysts to evaluate them in these terms and publicize the results. In others, nonprofits began conducting surveys and focus groups to solicit feedback from beneficiaries and adapted programmatic offerings in accordance with their findings. Many nonprofits began using their websites to disclose the unvarnished details of meetings, discuss mistakes and failures, and amplify the often-overlooked voices of their organization. Even stodgy IRS filings—the annual Form 990—have come to read as lively chronicles of the year’s ups and downs. In fact, some nonprofits outstripped formal accountability requirements to such a degree that independent auditors worried their clients were creating liabilities in pursuit of radical transparency. 

As one nonprofit leader recently told me, “Our funder might ask us for these ten indicators, but we’ve got another ten that we think are really important. Even though the funder isn’t going to ask us for them, we’re going to find a way to do them.”

These observations—and their apparent departure from the expectations of sociological theory—raised an important question. Why would nonprofits pursue such extensive accountability when the bare minimum would’ve sufficed? 

To answer it, my paper, “Organizational Supererogation and the Transformation of Nonprofit Accountability,” characterizes the process through which organizational action came to outstrip external demands. To do so, it advances a sociological theory of supererogation (a concept moral philosophers use to describe voluntary acts that exceed the demands of moral obligation). In my account, Bay Area nonprofits neither recoiled from nor conformed to the dictates of external evaluation. And while they certainly had misgivings about specific evaluative obligations, they nevertheless agreed that nonprofits ought to be accountable to the people and communities they serve. Indeed, among the nonprofits I studied, accessibility and responsiveness to community needs featured prominently in organizational histories. Many were founded by activists with abiding interests in the issues facing their communities. Founding documents, bylaws, and mission statements testified to these commitments as well. “Accountability,” one director explained, “is in our belief system.” 

But ‘accountability’ lends itself to numerous interpretations and courses for action. So, while nonprofits did not question whether they should be held accountable, they had serious misgivings with regard to how they should be held accountable—especially when metrics, benchmarks, and performance indicators came to dominate a setting once characterized by direct feedback, in-person interactions, and word-of-mouth communications. To this end, among nonprofits required to disclose metrics to external parties in 2005, 74 percent observed major discrepancies between their own definitions of success and those imposed from outside. Exasperated, one respondent put it, “How can you have a measuring stick that is equally viable for the YMCA as it is for a 300-bed hospital?” Making matters worse, respondents decried external evaluations as wasteful and distracting, noting, for example, that “more time goes into the reporting and less time to actually working with people.” As one director shared, “It’s not that we’re not willing to be accountable. But the way that we’re being forced to do this, it’s not working.” 

Feeling caught between ‘thin’ external conceptions of accountability and their own ‘thick’ understandings of the ideal, nonprofits adapted evaluative practices to better suit their circumstances, imbuing them with new meaning, and using them to make their work legible to broader audiences. In some cases, nonprofits accompanied quantitative reports with extensive narratives. As one director explained, “I always write and explain the number. To me, without the explanation, the number is meaningless.” Others sought to embrace measurement and quantification on their own terms, often working with frontline staff and beneficiaries to devise evaluative protocols and determine performance criteria. To wit:

A food pantry emphasized the importance of interpersonal relationships by reporting on the number of meals staff enjoyed with beneficiaries over the past year (2,516).

An outdoor adventures program that, in 2005, had wished evaluators would “come see the smiles on participants’ faces” instead of simply measuring beneficiary throughput, reported in 2015 that, for 223 participants on a skiing trip, “it was the first time they’d experienced the magic of snow.”

An organization working on refugee settlement developed a social isolation survey and reported on statistically significant changes in clients’ abilities to make appointments, fill out forms, and read instructions.

The list goes on. 

Putting these disclosures in perspective, it’s important to remember that formal evaluations and quantification threatened to locate all nonprofits along narrow dimensions of accountability: higher overhead is bad; higher throughput is good. And while nonprofits have paid attention to these sorts of metrics (in many cases organizational survival hangs in the balance), they’ve also recognized that such numbers are, on their own, inadequate stand-ins for accountability. To them, it also mattered whether they were acting with integrity and whether their beneficiaries were treated with dignity, had found community, were able to support their families, or had found solace. By creatively repurposing evaluative practices and formal disclosures to incorporate idiosyncratic goals and reflect organization-specific circumstances, nonprofits went above and beyond baseline accountability demands. 

What does this process of supererogation mean for how we think about nonprofit accountability, evaluation, and civil society more generally? Well, in one sense, the mission drift and homogenization that some anticipated in the early 2000s doesn’t seem to have materialized. And while there’s no denying the frictions between nonprofits and the evaluative demands they face, we need not surmise—as sociologists might—that acquiescence is the only resolution. Instead, through supererogation, nonprofits found ways to reassert some of the meaningful distinctions these demands threatened to erode. 

In light of these developments, some may be tempted to breathe a sigh of relief. And, why not? Many nonprofits demonstrated plucky resilience in the face of stultifying pressures. What’s more, powerful players in the sector—including prominent funders, raters, and evaluative consultancies—seem to be embracing more textured understandings of accountability and performance. Rating agencies now implore donors to look beyond simplistic financial ratios and “consider the whole picture.” Foundations tout evaluation practices intended to reflect “the needs and priorities of grantees.” And several high-net-worth philanthropists appear to champion a policy of writing the check and getting out of the way. These developments, it would seem, are a strike against the ‘measure everything’ agenda.

That said, as more people become sensitized to the pitfalls of quantitative evaluation—its questionable utility, its ability to calcify biases behind a patina of objectivity, and the sheer resources required for rigor—we might wonder what’s redeeming about the endeavor. Relational forms of accountability are easy to idealize in comparison to cool calculation. But if money only flows along the lines of reputation and who-knows-who, then we’re just swapping one problematic practice for another. 

At the same time, there’s no denying that nonprofits have, on the whole, become a more measurement-savvy bunch. Some might be tempted to celebrate this outcome as a regulatory success story: subjecting nonprofits to formal oversight prompted them to go even further than required in terms of systematic measurement and public disclosure. Although nonprofits vary in what they measure and report, quantification has undoubtedly become the lingua franca of accountability.

One concerning implication of this shift is that, if we continue upping the ante on quantification, we may undermine the possibility of relational accountability altogether. In retrospect, it seems unsurprising that quantitative and impersonal mechanisms for accountability emerged out of a period when civic engagement and trust in the nonprofit sector were in decline. We might wonder whether nonprofits’ collective responses have successfully addressed these underlying issues or whether they’ve made us thirst for even more quantification. Has our demand for metrics turned us into “impact shoppers” at the expense of more hands-on civic engagement?

Perhaps it’s time to rethink the mechanics of formal oversight, quantitative evaluation, and the role that these practices play in the nonprofit sector. In doing so, the explosion of nonprofit accountability practices over the past two decades might provide a helpful guide—both for understanding what our current methods take for granted and for understanding how to move forward. When early-2000s accountability requirements attempted to paint a tidy picture, subsuming variegated organizations under simplistic rubrics, nonprofits responded with a more complicated image. Their approach to accountability reflected a range of voices and perspectives and reminded us that good evaluations must remain keenly aware of organizational and contextual variations that evade easy measurement. After all, if there’s one thing my study demonstrates, it’s that accountability doesn’t—and perhaps shouldn’t—mean just one thing.

-Aaron Horvath

Aaron Horvath is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society with a Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University. His work on the ascendance and democratic contradictions of American philanthropy, the civic consequences of nonprofit impact evaluation, and the digital-intermediation of community life has appeared in numerous academic and general audience outlets.