The Emerging Status of Outcome Measurement in the Nonprofit Human Service Sector

Abstract

Determining the separate and distinct contribution of the nonprofit human services sector is fraught with difficulty for a number of reasons. For one, such agencies are, more often than not, also recipients of government funding, generally a mixture of federal and state dollars from a federally legislated program. Consider, for instance, United Way—supported agencies as a microcosm of the nonprofit human services sector: government funding represents 45.7 percent of their total revenue. Thus, the distinction between public human services and private nonprofit is blurred from the outset.