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 finalists were Doorways for Women and Families, Latin American Youth Center, MVLE, New Hope Housing, and the Washington Office on Latin America. Each of the organizations provided a write up of their management practice, and they did a 20 minute interview/presentation during the session. News of the winner can be found here.

What I found nice about the session was that two of the organizations were reporting with dashboards to their board of directors. What I found interesting was that they all highlighted different management practices, which must make the evaluation process very difficult to determine the winner. I found myself thinking that it would be interesting to get them all to report on their management excellence as it relates to some of the strategy-focused organization principles connected to the Balanced Scorecard.

I don't know that they would need a strategy map, but you could start to have a framework from which to judge an organization's success. I thought all of the organizations really had a great management practice to show, but I kept thinking "Alignment," "Governance," "Leadership," etc.

Congratulations to the winners, it was great work.