> As Ritchie and Weinberg (2005) point out, non-profits' true competitors are other non-profits, not private individuals or businesses. "Although competition is recognized as a key challenge in strategic business management, its operation is rarely studied in the nonprofit sector. Previous research has implicitly taken the position that existing models of competition can account for the nonprofit case with only minor
adaptations. We argue that two fundamental differences between businesses and nonprofits make this assumption problematic: (1) nonprofits are motivated by non-monetary goals that often dominate financial considerations, and (2) diversity in the nature of these goals means that a
nonprofit and its rivals may be motivated by very different objective functions".
Thus in a sense we are comparing apples and oranges when we discuss the notion of non-profit organizations being competitive in the real estate industry. As the authors argue, non-profits do not fit the traditional competition models used in the for-profit private sector, because their organizational goals and values are not primarily monetary. This has always been an Achilles Heel for the non-profits, who must justify their continuing funding by demonstrating that they are succeeding in fulfilling their mission of service, which is much more difficult to quantify than the figure in the bottom line.
Discussing Robert Kaplan's Balanced Scorecard, Moore (2003) points out that those in the non-profit sector were relieved to hear his point that they should be evaluated on different standards than those applied to profit-making entities:
"The fact that this discussion of ultimate goals, strategies to achieve them, and measurements to check on both these things could be carried on using multiple, non-
financial metrics was a huge and welcome relief to the nonprofit world. It meant that they didn't necessarily have to monetize the value of the results t...