Balanced Scorecard and Metrics

Michael J Fox Foundation

Mission and Vision

The Michael J Fox Foundation is the world's largest non-profit organization for the funding of research that is dedicated to finding a cure for the estimated five million people living with Parkinson's disease. The organization has funded more than five hundred million dollars of research through the end of 2014 which is mostly targeted at groundbreaking high-risk and high-reward research targets (Eisner Amper, 2015). The organization makes the claim that 89 cents of every dollar that it spends goes directly to grants and other initiatives that are directed at finding a cure for Parkinson's disease (The Micael J Fox Foundation, N.d.). Therefore, one performance metric could be that the company must maintain internally is to maintain its high donation conversion rate.

The performance of the paid resources that the organization utilizes must be as efficient as possible to function effectively with minimal expenditures. One initiative might be to outsource as many business functions as possible to keep internal costs from a dedicated staff as low as possible. For example, IT maintenance tasks could be outsourced to India at a much lower rate than can be matched with an internal IT team. The organization will likely have many non-critical business functions that could be performed by low cost international providers. There might also be the opportunity to outsource to organizations in any location that might be sympathetic to the cause and be willing to work for a reduced rate or even donate some services or assets for free. Such strategies would be consistent with the organizations mission to make a high percentage of the donations go directly into research.

There are several other strategies that the MJFF can use to maintain their donation conversion rate. One strategy could be to recruit more volunteer labor that can be used to serve many organizational functions. Volunteer labor can greatly increase the human resources capacity without generating any additional expenses to the organization. Furthermore, local volunteers could also sponsor local events such as a funding event such as a 5K walk/run or other such funding initiative. Different metrics could be designed to measure performance from volunteers. For example, the organization could count the number of volunteers, the number of total volunteer hours contributed, or the number of charity events that volunteers hosted worldwide. The organization should set a target of having a volunteer team in each major U.S. city in each state. One initiative could be to recruit volunteers in regions that do not currently have local volunteers to fill in any gaps that are present.