Nonprofits: If we are not what we are not, then what are we?

For some time, now— going back to the Reagan Revolution of the 1980’s— nonprofit leaders have been urged to think of their organizations as businesses and, appropriately, we have been encouraged to run them according to business principles. To navigate these unaccustomed waters we were offered a device called the double bottom line— like a business we should always steer toward the point where income exceeds expense but we must also tack our ship ultimately in the direction of our mission. Our orientation became two-dimensional.

Thinking of a nonprofit as a business has had certain beneficial effects on the nonprofit psyche. Perhaps the most wholesome of these is the banishment of a “charity” mentality. Charity, as the name indicates, is focused on the good intentions of the giver. With the introduction of “outcomes thinking,” good intentions are no longer sufficient— now we have to calculate the actual benefits accrued to our clients as if they were stake/stockholders.

Both of these transformations— getting clear about money and embracing outcomes— have been important advances in the evolution of nonprofit thinking. And yet, for many of us in the nonprofit sector, thinking of ourselves as just another business remains deeply unsatisfying.

How could we be a business when we define ourselves as NON the very thing that most defines a business: PROFIT? This is something like defining a land creature as a non-gilled fish. And why do we, along with our European cousins, define ourselves by what we are not? The term non-governmental organization is as absurd as non-profit organization.

So how do we move past comparing ourselves to the very thing we define ourselves as not being? A good start might be to name our organizational type in the affirmative. If you named your daughter Not-Jane would it be any wonder that she became obsessed with this Jane person? Wouldn’t Not-Jack always suspect that Jack was the true measure of a man?

My vote is that starting January 1, 2014 we stop using the word Nonprofit and begin to refer to ourselves as Common Good Enterprises. And come to think of it, aren’t really good businesses just common good enterprises?

- Richard Jaeggi