To: Board of Steppingstone Theatre
From: Shiyao Luo
Date: 11/17/15
Re: Key Concepts of Nonprofit Standards, Ethics, Accountability and Transparency
1. Reasonably controlling the overhead expenses in order to have a better evaluation from watchdog organizations but do not only trying to cut this expense
• When watchdog organizations evaluate nonprofit organizations, they often focus a lot on overhead expenses and it is one of their standards to measure the success of the nonprofit organizations; however, many people argue that this measurement is not accurate and may have bias .
• According to Steppingstone Theatre’s financial reports, most of their expenses go to the salaries of employees and other expenses these two parts, and those numbers kind of stay in the same range for …show more content…
Trying to put up more information on their website so that both the public and watchdog organizations can access to them and understand better the organizations’ operations
• Watchdog organizations sometimes have a difficult time to track the documents of nonprofit organizations and it makes even harder for them to do the evaluation because of the lack of information, especially for some smaller nonprofit organizations .
• Steppingstone Theatre’s website only has the reports for the fiscal year of 2012 and 2013, and they did not put the Form 990 of fiscal year 2012 on the website . In my opinion, it is better to have more information on the website since their website is a bridge between public and the organization, also it will increase their transparency.
3. Spending more on the programs since it is the services and goods that nonprofit organizations provide to the public
• Expenses on programs should be the biggest expenditure for nonprofit organization because it indicates that they are actually concentrating on bringing more benefits to the larger population by those programs and it is also a key component that watchdog organizations will look at when they are doing the evaluation
From: Shiyao Luo
Date: 11/17/15
Re: Key Concepts of Nonprofit Standards, Ethics, Accountability and Transparency
1. Reasonably controlling the overhead expenses in order to have a better evaluation from watchdog organizations but do not only trying to cut this expense
• When watchdog organizations evaluate nonprofit organizations, they often focus a lot on overhead expenses and it is one of their standards to measure the success of the nonprofit organizations; however, many people argue that this measurement is not accurate and may have bias .
• According to Steppingstone Theatre’s financial reports, most of their expenses go to the salaries of employees and other expenses these two parts, and those numbers kind of stay in the same range for …show more content…
Trying to put up more information on their website so that both the public and watchdog organizations can access to them and understand better the organizations’ operations
• Watchdog organizations sometimes have a difficult time to track the documents of nonprofit organizations and it makes even harder for them to do the evaluation because of the lack of information, especially for some smaller nonprofit organizations .
• Steppingstone Theatre’s website only has the reports for the fiscal year of 2012 and 2013, and they did not put the Form 990 of fiscal year 2012 on the website . In my opinion, it is better to have more information on the website since their website is a bridge between public and the organization, also it will increase their transparency.
3. Spending more on the programs since it is the services and goods that nonprofit organizations provide to the public
• Expenses on programs should be the biggest expenditure for nonprofit organization because it indicates that they are actually concentrating on bringing more benefits to the larger population by those programs and it is also a key component that watchdog organizations will look at when they are doing the evaluation