Improving nonprofit accountability is one of the most important issues facing the sector. Improving nonprofit accountability in ways that are attentive to what we might consider unique and valuable about how nonprofits address public problems is the challenge at hand. This article presents a framework for examining the consequences of accountability systems for nonprofit practice. Drawing on empirical findings from three case studies and early sociological work on accounts, the framework considers four questions (i.e., When do organizations give accounts? What is the purpose of the account? When are those accounts accepted or rejected by important stakeholders? And with what consequence?) but makes a distinction between a verification and explanatory accountability process. By making this distinction and clarifying the relationship between these two accountability processes, the proposed framework can be used to identify conflicts between accountability systems and nonprofit practice and to understand how efforts to ensure accountability can spur a change in nonprofit practice, change stakeholder expectations for nonprofits or leave both intact.

Evaluators are challenged to understand human behavior in all of its natural complexity and individuality. Our work is conducted in natural settings, where history and context matter, where human behavior traces complex patterns of influence and relationship, where what is meaningful to those in the setting is both phenomenological and structural, arising from both lived experiences and the societal institutions that frame and shape those experiences. Engaging this complexity requires not a privileging of just one way of knowing and valuing, but rather a marshalling of all of our ways of understanding in a framework that honors diversity and respects difference. This framework is advanced in this article as a mixed-method way of thinking. A presentation of key concepts in the framework is followed by case examples from the US.

This article considers one mechanism that could create a clearer accountability path between nonprofits and their beneficiaries: Outcome measurement. Outcome measurement focuses attention on a nonprofit’s beneficiaries and whether they are better off as a result of the nonprofit’s work. The article analyzed 10 outcome measurement guides targeted to nonprofits, totaling more than 1,000 pages of text. The analysis shows that the guides were neither uniform in the conceptualization of nonprofit beneficiaries nor in how they directed nonprofits to use outcome measurement with their beneficiaries. Despite scholars’ suggestion that a nonprofit’s relationship to their beneficiaries is a key accountability relationship, the guides suggest that beneficiaries have an ambiguous standing, relative to other stakeholders, in the nonprofit accountability environment.

This article examines the tensions that surfaced for three nonprofit funding intermediaries-tensions between their historic practices and the new practices required to use performance measurement to ensure greater accountability and results among their grantees-and analyzes these tensions in light of literature on philanthropic and accountability relationships. From this analysis, the article makes three points. First, philanthropic relationships are not equivalent to accountability relationships. Second, because of these differences funders that adopt performance measurement may encounter tensions as these new practices challenge the importance of other philanthropic concerns. Third, without a systematic way to attend to these concerns when adopting performance measurement, funders face an impoverished choice: reward measurable results or fall back on supporting good intentions.

Community development financial institutions (CDFIs) help to address the financial needs of under-served, predominantly low-income communities. CDFIs include community development banks, credit unions, business and microenterprise loan funds, and venture capital funds. Although CDFIs are a rapidly growing and an increasingly important area of community economic development, they have not received proportionate attention from academic researchers. This article begins to address the gap. It outlines the history of the CDFI industry and details how CDFIs are responding to three specific development needs: basic financial services; affordable credit for home purchase, rehabilitation, and maintenance; and loan and equity capital for business development. The article then considers the strengths and limitations of CDFIs, concentrating especially on the relationship between CDFIs and conventional financial institutions. It concludes by examining the impact that these alternative financial institutions realistically can hope to achieve.