Did you really ask "is there any value in leading a moral life if it doesn't pay off financially?"
Non-profits do not actually aim at financial gain (duh!), so measuring their success in monetary term is an error of categories. Of course it is difficult to assess success of an endeavour like that, and Aaron is right in raising awarness for these difficulties, but forcing an inappropriate kind of measurement (did your non-profit make enough profit?) on them doesn't help solving this problem.
The correct question to ask are "what are our goals?" "How do we go about reaching our goals?" "Did our past activities in fact further our goals?" and so on. "how much more money did we raise and distribute" may factor in the analysis, but on its own it is pretty meaningless.
In the world of development, it is often quite easy to get cynical over the multitudes of people who make rather significant amounts essentially tax free working abroad. Even in some local charities, we have to be careful about this notion that because their mission seems pure that they are in fact pure.
Sometimes (and I'm afraid more often than even I suspect) instead of generating profits what would be "profits" instead accrue to what I'll call local empire building - managers building their own little fiefdoms of employees who report to them. Generally there's not as much pressure to stop it if the organization is reasonably well funded. Alternatively, they pay themselves more to soak up any potential profit so they can perversely call themselves not for profit.
Otherwise I agree - choosing metrics is not an easy task to be taken likely. Profitability/+cash flow are however far easier metrics to measure and manage.
There are many reasons to do things other than money, but when you are dealing with people that you don't personally or directly know the fact that they are willing to pay for your services is basically the only real signal you have as to whether you are benefiting them. And if you are not making more doing this (for a combination of monetary and non-monetary benefits) than you could something else, then you need to switch to a better use of your time.
Of course, the contributors benefit from donating money, etc by signalling effects and warm fuzzies, but that doesn't mean the recipients are benefiting nearly as much as the contributors are spending.
As Friedman put it in "Machinery of Freedom", there are basically only three ways to work with others - love or shared goals, free exchange, or coercion.
Non-profits do not actually aim at financial gain (duh!), so measuring their success in monetary term is an error of categories. Of course it is difficult to assess success of an endeavour like that, and Aaron is right in raising awarness for these difficulties, but forcing an inappropriate kind of measurement (did your non-profit make enough profit?) on them doesn't help solving this problem.
The correct question to ask are "what are our goals?" "How do we go about reaching our goals?" "Did our past activities in fact further our goals?" and so on. "how much more money did we raise and distribute" may factor in the analysis, but on its own it is pretty meaningless.