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let's suppose that you are the leader of a nonprofit that you believe has extraordinary potential to change people's lives let's also suppose you've embraced the belief that what actually generates meaningful social value and improves people's lives is demonstrated performance not assertions of effectiveness but the consistent high quality and unglamorous delivery of programs and services that are a key question you will inevitably confront is how do you bridge the gap between your aspirations for impact and your pragmatic need to get things done and that's where management tools come in simply put these are practices activities or processes that have been developed over time to help leaders of nonprofits address critical management challenges of a wide variety of sorts from building effective organizations to ascertaining the true costs of your operations to building effective performance measurement systems of course there is a catch the sheer volume and complexity of these tools makes it next to impossible for any given individual to sort through them in a way that can enable you to get your arms around even the most basic questions like what should I even be considering which one's work better in which circumstances and what does it take to apply them effectively this is especially challenging where a leader is funding constrained or otherwise overburdened to address this challenge we at Bridgespan decided to initiate our management tools and trends project we enlisted the efforts of more than 25 nonprofit leaders funders practitioners and intermediaries to help us select which tools and trends to focus on then we designed a survey and administered to nearly 500 nonprofit leaders which was intended to help us understand very important questions like which tools they actually utilized which ones they found to be most satisfactory and how much effort they and their organizations invested in trying to make these tools effective three findings from the survey really stood out first that current use of these fools his widespread throughout the sector and based on projected use poised for future growth second relationship oriented tools were much more popular than ones that were purely analytic with partnerships and collaborations leading in both use and satisfaction finally satisfaction with the tools is generally high but as you'd expect it varies with the effort invested as a rule the more you put in the more you get out perhaps even more interesting is that as we dug deeper we found some pretty interesting anomalies often that had to do with comparisons between expressed opinions on trends and usage of tools the first interesting anomaly has to do with performance measurement on one hand we observed that nonprofit leaders see the prospect of tremendously increasing value and importance to performance measurement and they're acting on it on the other hand they have significant doubts about the extent to which funders will increase funding to support that the second interesting anomaly has to do with talent management on one hand nonprofit leaders are telling us that this is an enormous ly important priority on the other hand sixty percent or more have not taken advantage of the critical tools that actually help them do this the third interesting anomaly which actually may be more of a tension has to do with how leaders view growing the impact of their organizations over time on one hand we're seeing that leaders of large organizations have a strong interest in appetite for exploring fundamentally different pathways like the development of policy or field building or developing new technologies on the other hand when it comes down to which programs are actually going to focus on most we're saying that leaders across all sizes of organizations have a fundamental commitment to their core program as opposed to focusing energy on developing new ones if you feel you're struggling with how to bridge this gap between your aspirations for impact your need to act what can you do next we would suggest that you visit our website at this link here you will find several resources we've assembled including the full report of this project an on-demand webinar that features nonprofit leaders with experience using these tools and a complete list of the tools themselves along with descriptions case studies and suggested additional readings all of which will enable you to learn more and to determine which ones might meet your organization's needs and you can help us as well in fact this video is just a small part of a larger effort to make the management tools and trends project an ongoing resource for the entire nonprofit sector so if you have any questions or suggestions we would love to hear from you so please drop us an email thank you very much