Focus on Simplicity — Sabrina Parsons writes about starting small by focusing on your customers real pain points and needs.

The “KNOW” factor — People have to know you’re out there before they can decide whether they like or trust you. Marketing pro Cidnee Stephen discusses the importance of getting known.

Do you Really Want That MBA Degree? — Trying to figure out if going back to school for your MBA is a good fit for you? Tim Berry offers some things to consider in making your decision.

But what about evaluating the effectiveness of your programs, efficiency in using your funds, and choosing which new program to add to your non-profit’s purview?

GiveWell, an independent, non-profit charity evaluator, has come up with a process for assessing which charities make the best use of donor funds, not just in terms of administrative costs, but how well charities accomplish their stated mission: how many people do they actually help, and at what cost?

Although GiveWell presents itself as a tool for donors, their evaluation model is helpful for anyone running a non-profit, as well. Consider how your non-profit organization would measure up to their criteria:

1. What’s your cause? Is it clearly defined, or does it try to straddle multiple challenges and populations? The more narrowly you define your cause (your ultimate goal), the more likely you are to be able to produce measurable outcomes, and direct your efforts where they are effective. For example, “providing refrigeration units and the energy to run them in 15 rural clinics which serve children in need” is a more measurable goal than “helping poor children in rural areas.”

2. How scalable is your work? If you suddenly received ten times as much funding as you currently have, would you be able to generate ten times as much benefit for your targeted beneficiaries? Or are there non-monetary obstacles surrounding your projects (political resistance, lack of qualified personnel to carry out the program, etc.)? If there are non-monetary obstacles, these are good opportunities for working with other groups to fix these structural problems. Perhaps you can jointly sponsor training in related fields, or create a united political front about the need to help your targeted population. Be creative.

3. Are you sure that the solutions you’re providing are actually working, and not just correlating with unrelated changes, or even making things worse? This is a tough one. It requires not only that you have good intentions, but that you make tough choices about proven vs. likely solutions. It’s easy to measure the benefit of providing a tuberculosis vaccine in a community with high TB rates, because years of scientific study have already been done. It’s much harder to measure the long-term impacts of providing a micro-loan to a small business owner (who has already demonstrated the gumption to get a business going, and might do fine with a different funding source). For a nice example of counter-intuitive donating advice from an economic perspective, see Begging in India and How to Actually Help the Poor, by GoriGirl.

4. What are the opportunity costs of the ways you deliver aid? Essentially, this is the question of how many people you are helping per dollar spent. Ideally, you want to be able to track, long-term, not just how your aid helps an individual directly receiving it, but also all those others that are indirectly affected. If you loan money to a woman to buy a cow, with which she can support her family, are you also helping: her children, who go on to have an education? Her extended family? Her community, as she re-invests those profits and hires others in her village? Are there more cost-effective ways of helping that number of people in those ways? This question requires a thorough economic, social, and possibly medical understanding of the conditions in which your aid is being delivered, so you can clearly outline the situation both with and without the aid you provide.

5. How well are you documenting your successes and failures? Every non-profit has failures. The beneficiary who sells the donated goods to buy drugs; the medical effort that fails because a flood washed out the road and the doctors couldn’t arrive in time. It’s okay to have failures and make mistakes – but it’s essential to document them, analyze them, and learn from them. This is how you hold your organization accountable to donors and beneficiaries for the way you use funds.

These are just a few of the really good questions that GiveWell asks when it reviews a charity. Take a look at their website for more ways you can improve your non-profit’s ability to measure its effectiveness and efficiency.

by Sara Prentice Manela
Editor
Palo Alto Software

This webinar will feature business planning expert Tim Berry. Tim is the best-selling author of “The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan” and founder and President of Palo Alto Software.

Tim will offer practical tips for running your business better.

Attendees will come away with real world tips for planning and managing that can be put into action right away.

It’s not just a plan, it’s planning, steering, and managing your business.

Register Now

Thu, Nov 19, 2009 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Pacific Time

The Best Startup Funding is Initial Sales — Nothing funds a new business like actually having sales.

Want ECP News? Check Your Dashboard – A cool widget on your Email Center Pro dashboard connects you to news from the ECP Blog.

How I Tweet — Guy Kawasaki shares his work flow for using Twitter as a marketing tool

5 Ways to Improve Your Email Replies — Auto replies can really turn off your customers. These tips can help you make your messages more useful and less annoying.

How to Get Lucky With Content Marketing – Everyone who writes a blog wants people to read it. What can you do to get more eyeballs?

Melodie Ellis

“I guess I was tired of dealing with politics… When you work for somebody else sometimes it can seem like no matter what you do you’re not going to be able to make things better,” Melodie remembers. But she had learned that things are different when you are your own boss. “When you have your own business, you can change everything by your actions.”

Five years later, 14 contractors now work for Melodie, and Learn Piano in Your Home caters to over 200 students, providing private lessons not just in piano, but also in voice, guitar, drums, brass instruments, and more.

“As I started to grow, I saw the need to write a business plan,” says Melodie, but since her business was so small and she had such limited time at her disposal, it wasn’t a huge priority. “What really motivated me to do it was that I  wanted to apply for a grant.” As a member of the National Association for the Self-Employed, she was eligible to apply for a $5,000 Business Development Grant. Applicants are required to meet certain criteria, including submitting a business plan.

Melodie knew she would have to do some research. She bought a few books to help guide her through the plan-writing process, but says they weren’t nearly as helpful as she had hoped they would be. “I found them to be very theoretical and not practical at all. I didn’t get anywhere with them. I understood the concepts, but when it came down to putting it all on paper… the books were just really poor at trying to help me do that.”

Next she hit the Internet, looking for some business-planning software to help. “And that’s when I found Business Plan Pro. It was definitely worth it, because it allowed me to put everything together and it made it all practical and very real.”

One of the challenges Melodie faced in writing her plan was the fact that her business had been in operation for several years prior to putting the plan together. “I had to go back and think through things very concretely. I hadn’t always paid attention to the numbers or tracked them that carefully…  I had to get all those numbers from my history and somehow incorporate them into my plan. And that can be hard when you don’t have an MBA,” she says with a laugh.

In the end, Melodie’s hard work paid off. “I know that the fact that my business plan was well put together was definitely a major factor in getting the grant,” says Melodie.

“One of the most helpful things about the software was that, at the beginning, it asks you the question about whether you’re an existing business or a brand new business, and it tailors the plan based on your answer,” Melodie comments. She had tried other tools but found that they didn’t make this distinction, and in fact seemed to be based on the assumption that business plans were only for start-ups. That made the process harder for her, trying to fit details about an ongoing business into a start-up format.

“Just that one choice made all the difference in the world.”

Three Magic Questions That Drive Sales — Asking the right questions can not only close a deal, but help you get what your service is worth.

See an example — When you’re working on a business plan, sometimes examples are just what you need to get started.

Homepreneurs and Pots of Gold — A new report shows that home offices are employing a lot of people, doing a lot of business, and making serious money.

Is Disaster Recovery Possible When the Computing Cloud Evaporates? – Data loss happens. Are you prepared for the worst case scenario of complete data loss?

Success by Listening, Correcting and Evolving — Sometimes it takes several attempts before you get your business idea, and the pitch for it, right.

Don’t Believe the Hype: Email’s Not Dead –  Despite recent blogs saying the contrary, email is alive and well, and not going to be replaced by social media any time soon.

The Big Idea behind every “Young Gun” — An inspiring post by author and guest blogger Robert Tuchman, about finding your niche and excelling in it.

Gee, You Had to Pay $2, Once, to Get News? — Tim Berry writes about the reluctance of some iPhone users to pay a one-time fee for content that includes advertising.

The Impression of Specialization — Having the right email addresses can make a difference in how you are perceived by the people who want to contact you.

Good planning for succession in the family business — Handing down the family business can be done in many ways. Here’s one family’s interesting method for making the transition.

The Easiest Way To Explain the Marketing Process — Marketing expert John Jantsch uses an hourglass analogy (rather than a funnel) to explain the marketing process in simple and practical terms.

Commerce Department on Entrepreneurship Bandwagon — Tim Berry’s take on the recent announcement of the formation of the new Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.