The role of board skepticism in strengthening nonprofit performance measurement and accountability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We interviewed 21 board chairs of nonprofits with social missions to ask how their organizations assess performance when they cannot adequately track the intangible work by employees or the outcomes of this work. We find that the uncertainty around tracking performance data makes boards skeptical of their ability to assess performance in these organizations. Our study suggests that the skepticism of these boards inspires effective strategies focused on decreasing uncertainty around performance. These strategies include tracking a combination of quantified data, process data, and narratives from employees and clients, and ensuring specific board processes that foster a psychologically safe environment for discussion and checking against cognitive biases. We find boards in these organizations to be aware, engaged, and effective at assessing performance and we suggest that policy makers can be better informed by accessing the knowledge and strategy used by these boards.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.124 | 0.264 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".