By Isis Rodriguez ‘27
Last spring, a team of CBE members partnered with Brothers Building A Better Nation (BBABN), a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping young Black and Latino men in the Newark area meet all of their needs, thrive, and succeed. The CBE team delivered recommendations for Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) the nonprofit can use to continue to develop their growing financial and organizational practices to maintain transparency and accountability both internally and to external funding and community partners. In working with Brothers Building a Better Nation, the CBE team was able to gain key insights into the unique challenges and research techniques of nonprofit KPI development, ultimately helping BBABN develop KPIs that uniquely support their financial and organizational development.
KPIs for Nonprofit Versus For-Profit Organizations
CBE team members underscore that nonprofit and for-profit organizations have very different motivations which greatly impact how KPI research was both researched and presented to the client.
Analyst Joseph Price ‘27, found in his research process that there was a much larger emphasis on qualitative KPI development for BBABN, especially given the vast community-driven programs the nonprofit runs, including mentorship and harm reduction. He stated that nonprofits are “like businesses that [do] charitable things” and that while for-profit organizations focus on KPIs catered towards revenue, nonprofit KPIs have the objective of “maximizing impact” on their designated community. Thus, in Joseph’s research process, he largely focused on putting himself in the place of the young men of color BBABN serves, asking himself what kinds of programs he would look for, and subsequently discovering whether data largely supported his feelings and devising plans and KPI metrics accordingly.
Case Team Lead Theresa Huang ‘26 shared a similar sentiment. “There is a difference,” she stated. “Nonprofits are geared more towards the community whereas for-profit organizations tend to be more revenue driven.” However, regardless of motivation, Theresa notes that “analysis largely remains the same” and the main aspect of research and final deliverables that changes is the language used to present, which more accurately reflects the different goals of each type of organization. She gave the example of “competitive analysis” for a for-profit organization, a term that becomes “nonprofit comparison” in the nonprofit context.
Research for this case and its deliverables aligned more with qualitative, community-based goals outlined in conversations with the client — a departure from our research for for-profit organizations that often centers around maximizing profitability and ROI for continued operations.
The Major Challenge
A large challenge of working with nonprofits like BBABN is devising strategies around BBABN’s limited financial resources.
BBABN founder and leader Quadeer Porter agrees that nonprofits like his are very community focused. His organization and others like it — nonprofits born out of the pandemic and not bringing in steady streams of income — face issues defining boundaries of the limits of the organization's powers within the community. Porter outlines that BBABN helps as many people as possible. However, the nonprofit’s stream of funding, which comes from donations, is no match for the power of the income stream of for-profit organizations with clientele who buy into the organization both literally and figuratively, and with investors that supplement and support major spending ventures. As such, nonprofits face a double burden of heightened responsibility to those they serve without all the necessary financial resources to always comfortably and adequately serve them.
Our Solutions
To bridge the gap between financial limitations and maximized community impact, Theresa and Joseph stress, per Theresa’s words, “balancing the quantitative and qualitative metrics.” Although nonprofit KPI metrics are often largely qualitative, the research to create them is not much different from the research involved in developing quantitative KPIs for for-profit organizations. Thus, being intentional about quantitative KPI development in the research process proves to be a powerful way for nonprofit organizations to have a variety of metrics measuring the strength of the relationship between the nonprofit and the communities served against the internal financial organization of the nonprofit.
For BBABN, it was important to remain creative in the KPI development process, as the increased financial burden of nonprofits affects the feasibility of any solutions a case team may devise. Joseph reflected that the limited resources of the nonprofit sector forced him to think more “creatively” about affordable programming BBABN could implement for increased public exposure in community and donor sectors. Joseph also got creative with affordable technology for KPI data collection, so that BBABN could have all the necessary financial and programming data continuously.
Theresa encourages nonprofits, especially those founded more recently, to build up data before launching the organization into the games of comparison with other nonprofits. As the nonprofit establishes its niche, the KPI sample data taken in the short term may no longer be an accurate data set for the nonprofit’s newfound long-term plans. This conflict necessitates a reframing of the KPIs, as well as a restructuring of data collection and data analysis metrics. Critically, by advising both long-term and short-term flexibility around their KPIs and developing key metrics to gauge success, CBE helped ensure that BBABN can adapt to the ever-changing needs of the community they serve in a sustainable manner going forward.
Are you looking for a personalized approach to measuring organizational outcomes through creative KPI development? CBE is committed to delivering thoroughly researched, high-impact solutions catered to the needs of our clients. If you would like to learn more about how CBE could work with your organization, contact us at info@harvardcbe.com or by navigating to the Contact page of our website.
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