Australian Researcher at US Conference
23 October 2000 at 12:10 pm
When ANU researcher Natalie Buckmaster delivers her paper to the annual conference of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organisations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) in the US in November the title of her paper is likely to attract a lot of attention.
It’s called Captured by Masculine Accounting – Measuring Performance in Not for Profits and Buckmaster will present a critique of Australian policy and procedure.
She says the push to quantify performance in order to get government funding, and particularly in attempts to establish corporate partnerships and liaisons, is fast encroaching on the Australian scene.
Buckmaster says instead of blindly following the overseas experience, Australia should be getting back to the use of qualitative information and look at the big picture of performance.
She believes Not for Profits are struggling to find the triple bottom line in a sector that really has no bottom line and NFPs need to take a closer look at budgeting procedures.
She says some organisations in Sweden for example are abandoning traditional budgeting and are looking at other ways of managing performance.
Buckmaster says rolling forecasts are being used successfully instead of strategic budgeting.
Natalie Buckmaster has an accounting background and has carried out extensive research into performance measurement. Her papers on benchmarking and debt management in the third sector have been published in international journals.
She says once her paper is delivered to the ARNOVA Conference in New Orleans she will travel to various European countries, including Sweden, to examine third sector financial trends.
