A New Approach for Measuring and Strengthening Nonprofit Capacity

Nonprofit leaders routinely struggle to maintain financial sustainability while doing more to serve their missions in an ever-changing world. When nonprofit organizations make commitments to serve beneficiaries, they create ‘invisible liabilities’—obligations that do not appear on financial statements but that are critical to operations. Nonprofits also benefit from ‘invisible assets,’ promises of financial and voluntary support from others. By assessing how much invisible assets exceed invisible liabilities, nonprofits can understand their ‘invisible net assets’—their latent capacity for further growth and development. This new paradigm—the Invisible Balance Sheet—is analogous to the financial balance sheet and other accountability structures and offers an equally powerful lens into nonprofit vitality and sustainability.

In this SSIR Live! session, attendees will gain a deeper perspective on how nonprofit governance and planning should reflect the balance between promises made by others to nonprofit organizations and the commitments organizations themselves make and embrace. Nonprofit leaders and board members with a heightened awareness of their invisible net assets can be more effective in making decisions about new programs, capital expansion, or building resilience.

In this program, we will arm you with frameworks to rethink assets, liabilities, and net assets, within-session exercises, worksheets, and illustrative case studies. We will outline how to weigh the elements of the invisible balance sheet, with exercises to deepen your understanding of your organization’s underlying capacity. Nonprofit leaders can plan to increase and sustain their invisible assets, carefully manage their invisible liabilities, and deploy their latent capacity to further their mission.

This session will be facilitated and led by Roland J. Kushner, professor of business at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Professor Kushner has 40 years of experience in nonprofit management, and his resear