ABSTRACT
The Outcomes Movement and performance measurement. This chapter examines the potentially revolutionary effort to have nonprofits begin to justify themselves not in terms of the existence of problems nor in terms of activity (how busy they are and how hard they try), but rather upon the measurable basis of results. Tracing the history of the move toward measurement, the chapter explains how the concept of nonprofit measurement developed, the influence of later 20th-century corporate management theories, and how those gelled in the form of the Government Performance and Results Act and the modern Outcomes Movement. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the sector’s response to these changes.
