Testimonials from Nonprofit
Don’t just take it from us. Here’s what nonprofit leaders say:
“We felt it necessary to adopt and adapt the principles and practices of the best-run companies in America to our particular organization in an effort to focus on our customers, align our resources with their needs and expectations, [and] drive the processes that created excellent results.”
“People ask, ‘Why Baldrige?’ My answer is very simple: a Triple A bond rating on Wall Street from all three rating agencies, bringing capital projects in on time and within budget, a 96 percent business satisfaction rating, a 94 percent resident satisfaction rating, an overall quality rating of 95 percent, and an employee satisfaction rating of 97 percent … that’s why we’re involved with Baldrige.”
“A corporate management model is absolutely necessary in government. We in government live in a slew of production functions. The challenge is to harness all those resources, point them in the direction of your customers, and provide the goods and services to your community in the most responsive and responsible way.”
“We … see a number of cities around the country that are beginning to focus on the Baldrige Criteria and take a holistic approach to performance excellence…. We are forming a consortium for benchmarking purposes and comparing data…. More and more cities and local governments are joining on to look at best practices and to compare their results with other high performing cities. It’s great for government in America.”
—Michael Levinson, City Manager, City of Coral Springs, 2007 Baldrige Award recipient
“The Baldrige process has been a 15-year journey for the City of Coral Springs.… For us, it wasn’t about winning the Sterling Award, and it’s not about being a Baldrige recipient. What it was about was the continuous feedback it gave us so we could improve every year... It wasn’t just looking at leadership, or … measuring, or … results. It was looking at all of those as equally important and giving us a framework to put our plans on and our improvement efforts on.”
—Susan Grant, Director of Human Resources, City of Coral Springs, 2007 Baldrige Award recipient
“The value of the [Baldrige] process is that there is a constant eye on taking things to the next level. So the process … was a fantastic journey that made us perform better, that made us more enthusiastic, that had us connect with that many more citizens in that much more of a personal way.... So as an organization, … we share with our citizens what’s next [and ask]: What else can we do? How can we be better?”
--Mayor Scott Brook, City of Coral Springs, 2007 Baldrige Award recipient
“We were looking for a way that would help us have the best business practices of any government agency. That was our goal. We wanted to be the best in that particular area. We looked around and …we had people who said, ‘Why don’t we look at the Baldrige Award?’”
“The advantage of applying for these awards is not to win them or not to receive them. It’s to get the feedback from these experts from the outside who look at your organization in great detail and tell you what you do well and what you don’t do so well. And we concentrated on the things that we didn’t do so well to improve in those various areas.”
—Dr. Joseph A. Lannon, Director, U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC), 2007 Award recipient
“We thought, ‘What are the results we need to make ourselves a better business in government terms?’ So we really didn’t look at the financial results. We looked at the increase in revenue coming into ARDEC. We broke down the customer base, we targeted customers, and we made a determined quest to go after more resources. We’ve been able to double our incoming revenues from about 2001 to 2007.”
“By studying some of the other Baldrige applications, we found that we weren’t taking credit for a lot of things we did intuitively. So we went out, we looked, we benchmarked with other Baldrige applicants, with other quality organizations, and … started fresh with our results, because we had been stuck in that government mindset, and we knew that it wasn’t getting us what we needed.”
“We couldn’t not afford to do Baldrige. We did not sit in a good light with our headquarters. The government was looking at downsizing, and [we need] lots of extra resources to just take care of the minimum. We needed the business successes and without the Baldrige framework, I thoroughly believe we would have never gotten there.”
—Mary Manser, Director of Financial Management, ARDEC, 2007 Award recipient
