Ruth McCambridge
Edito-in-Chief
Nonprofit Quarterly(NPQ)
www.nonprofitquarterly.org
The Nonprofit Quarterly:Framing the National Dialogue about Leadership and Management
As Editor-in-Chief of Nonprofit Quarterly, Ruth McCambridge sees CompassPoint as a partner in her goal of getting high quality information to nonprofit professionals where they can use it.
Ruth, an expert in conveying ideas and practices in the nonprofit world, says, “Communicating is really about speaking to people in a way that they can understand, relate to, and apply to their work. CompassPoint has without fail done that. Their work is very attached to rigor and grounded in real experience, so when CompassPoint communicates, people listen like crazy.”
As a national publication, Nonprofit Quarterly has the task of dispatching guidance to the national nonprofit community. “We work with management service organizations (MSOs) all over the country. Sometimes one of them will issue a report that is useful to their location, but I can count on very few fingers of one hand the number of MSOs that regularly issue reports that are useful to the national community, and CompassPoint is one of them.” Moreover, Ruth values the ability to channel research-based knowledge into a practice that people can make real in their work. “If you can’t speak the same language as those in the trenches, your research may have killed a bunch of trees or bored various roomfuls of peers out of their gourds. Compasspoint is rigorous and contributes to research in ways that are academically sound but they are also great translators. The approach is always completely grounded and accessible even to those working in the smallest of nonprofit settings.”
CompassPoint’s partnership contributes to the leadership conversation that Nonprofit Quarterly stewards across the county. “CompassPoint is one of our favorite caches of authors. It almost never strikes a wrong note in terms of the information it provides on the national scene.” Furthermore, “Jeanne Bell, and before her Jan Masaoka, have always played a strong leadership role in developing written guidance for practitioners. Jeanne has been involved, among other things as the Board Chair of the Alliance for Nonprofit Management and on NPQ’s board. Most important to me, however, is her presence on the editorial committee of the Nonprofit Quarterly journal. In this role, she helps frame the way this publication creates conversations among practitioners. She brings a sharp insight and deep humor to her role, and what this publication prints is incredibly enriched by her expanse of knowledge. Jeanne’s willingness to assume leadership nationally is a labor of love. It indicates to me a real willingness on the part of CompassPoint to take responsibility for the information base of the sector, the knowledge base of the sector. I’m a huge fan of CompassPoint. If you asked me to name 3 of the most fabulous MSOs in the country, CompassPoint would be right up there, if not the absolute first.”
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