What makes great nonprofits great?

Earlier this week, I attended a conference of the New Schools Venture Fund, a venture philanthropy organization that works to create and support high-performing nonprofit charter school management organizations. This gathering focused on research by Heather McLeod Grant and Leslie Crutchfield about nonprofit effectiveness.

The interesting thing they found: the nonprofits with the most impact are not so much better at managing themselves internally as they are better at building partnerships with other organizations to advance their cause. The most effective nonoprofits are certainly "good enough" when it comes to internal management, but it is the relationships they form outside the boundaries of the organization that propel them to unique impact.

For the full story, see their piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review or check out their book, Forces for Good.

How does this lesson apply to schools? I suspect its less true for schools than for most other kinds of nonprofit organizations. The quality of the experience that students have -- especially young students -- is determined so much by what schools do inside their four walls, and the skills and capacity that teachers and principals develop internally.

Yet, this is a good reminder for those of us involved in improving schools to "think outside the box...or the four walls" for the best ideas and for partnerships that can accelerate student learning. A great example: Partners in School Innovation here in the Bay Area teams up with public schools to help them close the achievement gap. They've gotten some solid results that the schools would not necessarily have been able to achieve on their own.

The first order of business for schools is to make sure they have their act together internally: high expectations, strong principal leadership and great teaching. But then, parent leaders and school officials should heed the lesson of this research and consider: what partnerships can we form to accelerate our success? And how can we advance our cause by partnering with others to advocate for changes needed in our education system?

This kind of thinking, as Grant and Crutchfield show, can help an organization graduate from modest impact to extraordinary impact.