One of the major tasks facing researchers, practitioners, and funders is the development of empirical tools to measure the inherent worth of nonprofit organizations as well as the sector as a whole. Renowned scholars present chapters on the state of the art of performance measurement in the nonprofit sector and seek to establish a framework for a long-term research agenda to identify, quantify, and self-assess those qualities that make the nonprofit sector unique.

Inhalt
I. Introduction.- 1 • Measuring the Contributions of the Nonprofit Sector.- II. Concerns of Measurement and Evaluation.- 2 • Measuring Failure to Find Success.- 3 • Challenges of Measuring Performance in Nonprofit Organizations.- 4 • Social Indicators for Assessing the Impact of the Independent, Not-for-Profit Sector of Society.- III. Civil Society and Governance.- 5 • The Vicious Circle of the Constricting State as Viewed through the Failure of Executive Leadership in Anglo-American Democracies.- 6 • The Necessity for Studying Organizational Advocacy Comparatively.- 7 • The Distributional Impacts of Nonprofits and Philanthropy.- 8 • Can Public Life Be Regenerated?.- IV Measuring the Impact of Various Subsectors and Special Populations.- 9 • Women and Philanthropy: Charting a Research Agenda.- 10 • A Theory-of-Change Approach to Evaluating Investments in Public Education.- 11 • Measuring the Impact of Nonprofit Health Care Organizations.- 12 • Revealing the Implicit: Searching for Measures of the Impact of the Arts.- 13 • The Emerging Status of Outcome Measurement in the Nonprofit Human Service Sector.- 14 • The Religious Dimensions of Giving and Volunteering.- V. Conclusions.- 15 • Measuring the Impact of the Nonprofit Sector on Society Is Probably Impossible but Possibly Useful: A Sociological Perspective.- 16 • An Agenda for Quantitative Evaluation of the Nonprofit Sector: Need, Obstacles, and Approaches.