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.

Columbia Business School's "Ideas@Work" blog had an interesting post last week entitled "The Nonprofit MBA." The premise was that in a time of unprecedented challenge for non-profits, hiring a MBA may be a way for social sector organizations to tap into management expertise that can help them survive. (Since MBAs are a lot cheaper now than they used to be!)

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.

The Winter 2009 issue of Sloan Management Review had an article entitled Does It Pay To Be Good? For those of us in the social and public sector, the answer is "usually not enough." While this article focuses on the corporate sector, and how for-profit organizations are using corporate responsibility as a marketing scheme, it has a few important lessons for us in the social sector as well.

I'm very happy to report that the first-ever Mission Driven Performance Management Summit in Washington, DC, was a smashing success! We had over 80 people in attendance and had incredible discussions about how the Balanced Scorecard can be used to drive lasting strategic change.

A recent article in the New York Times talked about the shift in focus of the Hudson-Webber Foundation in downtown Detroit. For years, Hudson-Webber has been funding organizations in the Detroit metro area. Given the changing philanthropic and economic landscape, however, Hudson-Webber has had to start playing a new role: "picking winners and losers."

Friday, October 24th was the first conference held by the MA Nonprofit Network. A gathering of over 300 professionals from the state's nonprofit sector committed to learning from and sharing ideas with one another was definitely a forum that should serve as a model to the sector everywhere.

Yesterday, Ascendant hosted a nonprofit and government networking breakfast that was focused on performance management. Over 80 people confirmed their attendance, and Dr. David Norton, creator of the Balanced Scorecard, gave a keynote address.

We heard you! We were fortunate to have over 75 of you at our breakfast in July, and we have spoken to many of you about your challenges and goals for performance management. The feedback was resounding: you would like to develop or improve your Balanced Scorecard programs. We also heard that you would like to learn from each other and do so in a cost effective manner. For this reason, we are launching two community-based training sessions on October 14th.

I first wrote about this topic in a blog post Is Consolidation the Answer - more thoughts. Since I made that post in June, some rather interesting comments have been posted on the Harvard discussion site.