Bigger Does Not Equal Better
October 2009
By: Laura Otten
When it comes to having a successful organization, size doesn't matter.
Confession: I was not always a popular feminist, even among my feminist peers. I didn't believe that just because we wanted to be regarded as equal to men that we had to be the same as men. We didn't need to mimic them by working long hours, barking orders, wearing suits, being cutthroat. Rather, we could be just as successful if we played to our strengths and did things our way, with our values and styles. But I was not heard.
I feel the same again today, as nonprofits try to become more businesslike. If watching our bottom lines and living within our means is being more businesslike, then absolutely, we must do so. But it does not mean we have to mimic everything businesses do—namely, the idea that bigger is better.
So what if these associations are small(er)?
Does that devalue their work and the good they do for
their constituents?
This seems to be a golden rule of business. Everyone wants a bigger share of the market, a bigger bottom line, a bigger workforce. Downsizing an organization is seen at best as a negative and at worst as a huge failure. "Oh," you hear, disdain dripping on every word, "you only have 20 employees."
And so it appears that nonprofits want to do the same, to become bigger for the sake of being bigger and not because it will help them better pursue their missions. And that scares me. Almost every professional association with which I've worked during the last five years has lamented its diminishing size: declining membership, lower attendance at conferences, smaller customer base. All of the organizations wanted to get back to those glory days when they were bigger. But why? Would it make them better? So what if these associations are small(er)? Does that devalue their work and the good they do for their constituents?
A while ago, I listened to the staff of an organization struggle to decide whether to accept an offer to "buy" a free building. The conversation never addressed the question of how the building would help the organization fulfill its mission. No, the conversation was all about how having the building would make them bigger. So what? Would it help them better serve their mission? Did they have the capacity to take care of the building? To use the building? When I asked how the building connected to the mission, I got cold silence. They had no ready answer, nor could they come up with one. But they were quite annoyed that I might have put the brakes on their opportunity to become bigger while having the audacity to challenge their focus on mission over size.
So, I go back to the associations that want more members. Why? Is it because being smaller means they are not serving their current constituents well? If the answer to that is yes, then it isn't the size of the organization that needs repair, but the type and quality of the services it provides that need immediate attention.
And that attention to quality, after all, would be more businesslike: making sure the goods you sell appeal to the market, which may in turn lead to attracting a larger share of that market. Let us make sure that we aren't putting the cart before the horse.
Just because the business world thinks bigger is better—perhaps because businesses can give a better return to their stockholders—does not mean that the same measure will work for us in the nonprofit sector. Will our stakeholders be better served by our nonprofit being bigger? Perhaps that will be true in some cases. But in most instances, size will have nothing to do with how well a nonprofit serves it constituents, whether it has 100 or 100,000.
In the nonprofit sector, let's understand that size is not the measure of the organization; how well an organization serves its true mission is.
Laura Otten, Ph.D., is director of the Nonprofit Center at La Salle University's School of Business in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Read her Nonprofit University blog at www.nonprofituniversityblog.org. Email: otten@lasalle.edu
