NPOKI

Fall 2008

Happy Fall! So far, 2008 has been a great year for the NonProfit Organizations Knowledge Initiative (NPOKI). In our continued search for better performance management tools, we’ve partnered with several key organizations to help us in providing more services for our members; we’ve built our first major tool for effective data collection; we’ve implemented member projects; and we’ve added key staff. As a virtual organization, we still maintain a lean, focused profile, while providing solutions and information for our members and our sector. And we’ve tentatively begun to reach out beyond our health community to the international community at large. All this in our first year of formal operation!

Headline News:

MERIT Is Here!

NPOKI members look to find the solutions and best practices to better manage our portfolio of projects and to measure the impact of the work we do. We need to answer three basic questions:

  • How am I doing?
  • How is my project doing?
  • How is our organization doing?

The common thread is our work in health projects around the world, where we document our global health performance and provide tools/solutions that work with each other using common standards of data exchange. Our first major project—MERIT (Monitoring & Evaluation Reporting and Indicator Tool)—advances both fronts.

MERIT allows nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to collect and report on project and program indicators against one or multiple frameworks, to capture different levels of detail using various collection schedules, and to aggregate and report the results to various stakeholders, including funders. It is based on the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system created by the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, one of our NPOKI members. We envision MERIT working from the lowest level of data collection and moving up the chain to the highest aggregate level:

Mobile Phone/PDA/Paper ↔ Clinic ↔ District ↔ Country ↔ Region ↔ Global

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Screenshot of sample target quarterly data, disaggregated by region, from the MERIT system.

Partnerships

One of the key strategies for NPOKI to ensure that our members are stakeholders in various important initiatives around performance management and knowledge sharing is to partner with organizations that provide like services. For NPOKI, partnership follows intense discussion, and it begins with a Memorandum of Understanding identifying the key areas of common interest and an agreement to discuss possible collaborations beneficial to both groups. Over the last year, we’ve pursued several partnership opportunities, including the World Health Organization’s Implementing Best Practices Project (led by Margaret Usher-Patel), InsideNGO (led by Executive Director Alison Smith), and Partners International (developer of COHORT software).

Monitoring & Evaluation Summit

NPOKI, in partnership with InsideNGO, will host a one-day Monitoring & Evaluation Summit for international organizations that gather data in low-resource areas. This is the first in a series of summits around key operational and performance issues for our community.

Our tentative speakers include representatives from UNAIDS, MobileActive, Health Metrics Network, AED-Satellife, International HIV/AIDS Alliance, and Partners International.

Meet Our New Board Chair and Staff!

It’s official! NPOKI is now a registered New York State not-for-profit corporation, thanks to the generous pro bono assistance of Weil, Gotshal, Manges, LLC. Our application for (c)(3) status is in preparation. With incorporation, we formally welcome our first NPOKI Board, as well as two new staff.

Help Secure NPOKI’s Future

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Through both the MERIT project and its advocacy, NPOKI is proving the value of providing focused attention on the intersection between program impact and technology. This nexus—the systems where outcomes, spending, donor reporting, and strategic goals meet—is often lost in discussions of the details of combining these vital components. It turns out to be terribly difficult to bring together. With a single-minded focus on bringing performance management tools into use, NPOKI can deliver, at just an incremental cost, the pay-off for the significant investments in program and strategic planning that its members and others in the nonprofit world have made.

NPOKI’s work must attract the level of funding required to move our activities to the fully operational level. We need to match the sophistication and rapidly evolving requirements of our members with the tools and solutions to control the complexity. We need to get them out of the custom software development business. We need to provide the resources for sharing the best practices and lessons learned around effective data management. We need to help organizations measure the impact of the work they do. We need to reach from the smallest client at the edge of the network right up to our foundations and government partners and provide them with the training and support to use all of the available resources. And we need to dream about what are next challenges will be.

NPOKI has operated leanly on several generous grants from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and on fees from our members. But none of our staff work full-time for NPOKI, and requests for needed assistance from our members and partners are piling up. We are actively seeking donor prospects to provide a minimum of $500,000 for the next year to develop the next phase of MERIT, to advance projects for which clients are waiting (the Sharing Best Practices wiki, a SubAwards database, and a Cooperative Local Information Exchange), and, ultimately, to help us find an integrated portfolio management system.

Soon, a New Name!

Yes, we’ve heard the giggles, we’ve seen the raised eyebrows, we’ve faced the look of bewilderment, we’ve heard the resigned sighs. And we’ve answered endless questions:

  • No, NPOKI is not a Swahili name for fill in the blank.
  • No, we didn’t actually pay anyone money for picking our name or any other branding item.
  • Yes, we know it’s difficult to pronounce.
  • Yes, it rhymes with hockey.
  • No, it’s for real.

We’ve been inspired by our friends at InsideNGO—who took a similarly “challenging” name (APVOFM) and turned it not just into a new name, but into a meaningful symbol for the wonderful work they do. So, with not much fanfare, we’re letting you know: Soon—very, very soon—we’ll be unveiling our new name, our new logo, and our new tagline. And when we do, remember this line from Robert Anderson’s “Tea & Sympathy”:

“Years from now, when you talk about this—and you will—be kind.”

NPOKI