Nonprofit organizations are accountable to many actors. This factor creates a lot of complication when it comes to transparency and impact assessment.  They are accountable to their funders to clients, and to themselves and their missions. In other words, they are accountable to all their stakeholders whether horizontal or vertical stakeholders. Usually the leadership of the nonprofit tend to pay more attention to accountability when there is a problem in the sector or within the organization. In that line of thought, it might be best for non-profit governance to always revisit the organization’s policy on accountability and ensuring they are compliant. Nonetheless, as posed in the reading, “is it feasible, or even desirable, for nonprofit organizations to be accountable to everyone for everything?”. I would argue that it is quite a hard task to do.

One of the many actors that nonprofit is accountable to is their clients, that is the people receiving the services although it may also include communities or regions indirectly impacted by nonprofit programs. Often, nonprofit organizations make the mistakes of overlooking the experiences of the people who are benefiting from their social programs. Their input is highly important at the evaluation period as they can give valuable insights into a program’s effectiveness, listening to them can only lead to better outcomes.

Ultimately, for this topic on transparency and even for evaluation purposes, one of the challenge for leadership, governance and management of nonprofits is to prioritize and to decide the actors they are accountable for.