Performance measurement in Non for Profit Organisation

They certainly are explained in the lectures!! In order to measure the performance of anything you need to know what they are trying to achieve. For companies the ultimate objective is to make more profit and so the main measures look at the profitability. This is not the objective of not-for-profit organisations. For example, the objective of the police force is not to make a profit - they have several/multiple objectives. For example, to reduce crime; to reduce costs. The problem is that the objectives often conflict - cutting costs is likely to mean more crime which makes it hard to measure whether or not they are doing a good job overall. When measuring the performance of companies, we can compare with the performance other similar companies i.e. competitors. The police (for example) don't have competitors and so there is nothing to compare with. For hospitals (for example) the government may insist that certain areas get priority over other areas, rather than leave the management of the hospital to decide what is the best way of spreading their resources. It is therefore not fair to measure how well the management is performing when they did not make the decisions.