I love my auto dashboard.  Without it I would have little or no idea how my oil, coolant, battery or even my speed is doing.  From my dashboard I know starting points and have reality checks and understand if action should be taken.

Entrepreneur's latest issue offers a peak at "Business Performance Dashboards".  Entrepreneur's Dashboard uses a database of nearly 20 million US companies to help provide benchmarks for 14 industries (see entrepreneur.com/benchmark).

I mention Entrepreneur's Dashboard as a backdrop for thinking about how we in the nonprofit sector can improve our understanding of what works and what might not work and to help set standards of performance.  Perhaps most poised to initiate community-wide and sectoral dashboards is the foundation community which is familiar with many of the nonprofit players and has great concern about performance as well as the size of the sector. 

Meanwhile, a Dashboard is useful internally for every nonprofit board and exec.  Think of how helpful your auto dashboard is in helping you know how "well" your vehicle is performing.  Now think about which indicators might tell you the same about your nonprofit.  Set a goal for each of these indicators and start a quarterly report that tells you the status of these items.  You might even have a few indicators for each of your nonprofit's pillars: program (e.g. number served vs. target); management (staff turnover or facility repair); governance (board meeting attendance); and sustainability (diversity of funding).