I had the pleasure of being at the best practices workshop and the awards ceremony at the Washington Post today. This was the 15 year anniversary of the award for excellence in nonprofit management. The Center for Nonprofit Management manages the award program. This year, there were some great finalists.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that the stimulus plan had $100 billion in it for school systems, with only one catch to the money. You had to demonstrate that you were making progress in improving the performance of students. This is money on top of all of the foundation money that is available to the same schools with the same challenge. "Show me you are making a difference."

School of Management Students taking the Strategic Performance Measures spent three hours role playing as Board of Trustees developing a Strategy Map for the School of Management. Their two classes on the Balanced Scorecard equipped them for the task. The output was a draft strategy map for the Simmons School of Management, the oldest all-women's business school in the country.

I recently had the opportunity to lead a clinic at GSMI's Enterprise Risk Management summit in New York. It was a very interesting and interactive session where we really had the opportunity to "roll up our sleeves" and talk about how risk management works (or doesn't, for that matter) in the trenches.

Ascendant has teamed up with the Association of Research Libraries to help several of its members build Balanced Scorecards for their organizations. This initiative kicked off not a moment too soon as one of the libraries was notified of a 12% cut to its funding next year. The idea of a library scorecard is not entirely new.

In London, some interesting news broke last week. The Department of Health hired McKinsey to draw up Balanced Scorecards for their Primary Care Trusts. The PCTs are the providers of primary healthcare in a centralized healthcare system like the UK. So of course the PCTs are not happy about it, but it does raise the question about whether a third party can build a scorecard for your organization.

I gave a presentation at the GSMI Corporate Social Responsibility Performance Conference last week in New York City. This clinic was fun and interesting. The topic was about aligning social responsibility with the Balanced Scorecard. If you have heard any of my presentations about the Balanced Scorecard in the past, you can imagine my approach.

Have you ever wondered what people were talking about online? People are Tweeting and Blogging about all kinds of things, and some of these things are related to the Balanced Scorecard. How are you supposed to keep up? I think it is too much to ask to search Google, then search Google Blogs, then search Twitter, and then look for other search engines and other social networks. Well we have made it all much easier at our redesigned BSC Community.

We recently returned from Digital Now 2009, an executive leadership conference focused on association leadership in the digital age. At Digital Now, we presented with Project Management Institute and American Society of Mechanical Engineers on how the Balanced Scorecard can be used to drive change and innovation in associations.

Photos from the Mission Driven Perfomance Management Summit are now available here. We look forward to seeing you at next year's event!