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 Benchmarking With A Warped Stick
A lot of nonprofit fundraisers seem to love benchmarking studies.
I really can’t blame them. Fundraisers are always judged by their numbers, after all. If we are going to be compared what we raised during the same period in previous years it only makes sense to understand the context of giving to other similar organizations.
Anytime your fundraising program experiences large increases or decreases, it’s helpful to understand if the change is being driven by broader external factors or by specific issues to your audience and mission. Benchmarking studies can help identify trends in key indicators and give fundraisers the context we need in order to understand our own performance better and plan for the future.
Unfortunately, not all benchmarking studies are created equal. Some studies are nothing more than lazy half-assed analysis from vendors hawking thinly veiled sales pitches. Other well-meaning benchmarks often use questionable methodology. A flawed approach can produce misleading conclusions.
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From Capitol Hill
 Hospices On Life Support In New Federal Budget
By Eleanor Clift
Hospice providers from around the country descended on Washington in early April for a lobbying blitz on Capitol Hill. President Bush’s budget proposal for ’09 contains some $5 billion of cuts in hospice reimbursements. Plus, the government agency that oversees Medicare and Medicaid payments is moving to cut reimbursement rates further through a regulatory rule change that doesn’t require congressional approval.
Part of what’s going on is the Washington game where the administration makes budget cuts to reduce the red ink knowing Congress will restore the money to popular programs. That’s been true in the past for hospice, which provides quality care for people at the end of life. But hospice isn’t the sacred cow it once was. It’s too big to be dismissed as “budget dust,” having grown five fold since 1997-98 when it was a $2 billion line item under Medicare to the $10 billion business it is today.
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On The Boundary
Are We All Vincentians Now?
By Jon Van Til
I recently had the honor of lecturing at DePaul University, and prepared myself to present a version of the “usual road talk” -- growing civil society, the need for all four sectors to work together, blurring of the sectors, and the like. On the plane out, however, I read through the materials I had been sent by my hosts, Patrick Murphy and Tamara Nezhina, colleagues in DePaul’s School of Public Service.
Among these materials was a special issue of a journal published at the university. The issue showcased a set of papers presented at a retreat conference in 2003, and I set about thumbing through the volume as the plane droned on.
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