T Minus 31 Days
Our 50 Days of Action countdown is still ticking, so it’s about time I tackled one of the daily action items myself. Today’s, unfortunately for me, involves statistics. Fortunately for me, it also involves serendipity.
Yesterday I was typing away when Rick dropped by to leave a book on Gina’s desk. “That looks like something fun,” I remarked.
“Do you like numbers?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said.
“Then it’s probably not much fun,” he replied with a grin.
It’s not that I don’t like numbers. I’m a mathematician’s daughter; I’ve pored over thick books about the Fibonacci sequence. I just don’t like how they get drained of blood and guts and rendered into statistics. I may be graduating with my MS in 16 days, but I’ve never taken a stats course. And statistics are The Thing for…well, a lot of things. Including, sometimes, legitimizing the work of the nonprofit sector.
Hence, the 2008 Nonprofit Almanac, which smells like fresh ink and new paper and is crammed full of tables I marvel at but can’t decipher. I admit, I swiped the book from Gina’s desk, but only temporarily, and not just to smell it. I started flipping through it from the beginning, careful not to crack the spine. The beginning is the easiest to understand, at least for me; it’s the big picture. But it still takes some grinding of the mental gears.
I’m glad the Urban Institute is good with statistics, because I’m not. But I’m decent at translating things. I did a stint as a Red Cross interpreter and wrote my undergraduate thesis on communicating nuclear policy for the masses. And there’s an important role for those of us who can understand (some of) the statistics on the nonprofit sector: to help other people understand them.
Here’s my stab at translating figure 1.4 on page 14:
In 2006, the “Gross Value Added to the U.S. Economy” by the nonprofit sector was $13.2 billion. That’s a lot of money. But it’s hard to imagine exactly how much money it is. Here are some things also worth about $13.2 billion in 2006:
California’s gambling industry
Missouri’s exports to foreign countries
The amount of money Americans spent on chocolate
China’s trade surplus in May
The discretionary budget for the US State Department
The GDP of Ethiopia
So, in a nutshell, if the nonprofit sector were to disappear, the US government could make up the lost monetary value by getting in its time machine, setting the dial to 2006, and annexing Ethiopia.
The good news is, while numbers help illustrate the monetary value of the nonprofit sector, stories are better for communicating the human value. You can hear some from the plenary speakers at the 2008 Nonprofit Congress National Meeting, June 1-4 in DC.
A shameless plug, yes; but with only 31 days to go, can you blame me?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Nonprofit Almanac, Nonprofit Congress, statistics
The numbers and the stories mask some disturbing realities. The money lands like rain, with drops hitting different places at different times, so the accumulative impact on solving social problems, is less than what we need from such a large amoung of money being spent.
In addition, the stories create the illusion that good work is being done everywhere. If you map the stories, segmented by cause, we quickly see that we’re not reaching many of the places where help is badly needed.
The Internet and new visualization technologies are emerging that enable us to capture these numbers and these stories in more innovative ways and that may change the way resources are distributed in the future.
Good luck in the National Meeting. I’ll be in Atlanta for the National Conference on Volunteerism and Community Service. The week prior to that I’ll be hosting the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference in Chicago.
Thank goodness we have blogs and other interactive forums to help us be in multiple places at the same time. Let’s hope many of stay connected in the months between these events so that when we meet again, we can point to the progress we’ve made toward our collective goals.