Today is International Women’s Day. “Equal Rights, Equal Opportunities: Progress for all” is the theme of this year’s commemoration.
From our vantage point here in the US, it can be easy to forget that many women around the world experience profound discrimination every day without protection of law. And millions of girls and women experience rape, domestic abuse, genital mutilation, and other forms of violence against women, regardless of where they live.
If you are at a total loss for an action to commemorate this day, you can add your voice to a petition being circulated by Amnesty International USA asking the United Nations to develop a stronger agency for women. You can find that petition here.
I’m organizing a workshop for later this month for the Grantmakers Council of RI called “How Grantmakers can Help Nonprofits Survive and Emerge Stronger in 2010.”
The workshop will focus on how this climate presents unique opportunities for this sector to become more intentional about strengthening the nonprofit and philanthropic infrastructure.
As a few of the grantmakers have been overly focused on mergers as the solution in these tough economic times, the discussion will highlight other opportunities shy of merger for collaboration and consolidation of management services.
Last Thursday I was chatting with a consultant colleague whom I’ve recruited to be on the panel. She was recounting her own work facilitating mergers and how these experiences have left her convinced that mergers are often not worth the time and expense that goes into them. She was pointing out that mergers usually require costly consultation and legal services and amazing amounts of time and energy from the staff and Read More >>
Dear Gayle and Jon,
I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for the Workshop “Getting the Most from your Annual Appeal” that you gave on Oct. 8th for the Land and Water Partnership at the Audubon Society of RI. I think that our letter was not as good as what you had presented, but it was a big improvement from previous ventures.
But the proof is in the pudding, right?! So, the bottom line, proof of the pudding is that last year we raised $31,365 through 88 gifts with our single page, tear off and send back approach.
This year, we received 173 gifts for a total of $62,570 for our two page, bulleted, story telling approach to support stewardship with the envelope provided!
So, we are giving you a ’soft’ credit (as they say in our business!) for doubling our gifts! We are so grateful!
I think Jon got me when he said he knew there were some people who just threw these letters in the trash, but for those who really care and want to know, give them something worth reading. I know many of our members in the land trust are the latter types, and I appreciate so much that you brought this to my attention.
I truly appreciate a good teacher, and this deserves recognition all its own. Many heartfelt thanks from the South Kingstown Land Trust!
I was just talking to a board chair who was lamenting the lack of attendance at board meetings and general lack of engagement overall.
One of the conditions I always query for is whether the board has any clear objectives for what it plans to accomplish over the coming year (or longer).
Board meetings are not in and of themselves meaningful work. I’ve attended a lot of meetings where I’ve left thinking “really, did they need me here for that!” Usually all I did was listen to reports where there was no action required. And any decisions before us were pretty inconsequential and didn’t really rise to the level of board work. A year of meetings like that and I’d be surprised if you had any attendance at all.
Every board can benefit from a set of annual objectives. I’d put the usual suspects on that list:
providing performance feedback to your Executive Director
setting with your Executive Director his or her goals and objectives for the coming year
reviewing and approving the audit and other critical monitoring of the health of the organization
recruiting and electing a high quality board
All of these are important fiduciary obligations of any board.
But what is the added value, the real difference that your board will make? Read More >>
In How we got the grant – Part I, I started telling you the story of how one organization overcame a long history of rejections to finally receive a grant from a very desired funder.
To quickly summarize:
The international child sponsorshop and development organization I worked for had tried and failed many times to receive a development education grant from the US Agency for International Development.
We learned that one of the reasons for this was that our donor-to-sponsored child and family communications were not taken seriously by the funder and undercut our credibility.
We initiated a process to explain the theory and practice behind our communications program to USAID. As a result of that, the door opened a crack.
Our first three lessons learned:
Get involved with your colleagues
Find out what funders think about you
You have to have and discuss a theory of change
That’s were I left off. On to the next set of lessons.
So, I now had the task of designing a development education program that would win funding and achieve our desired mission impact.
Lesson Four: Build your new program on your existing assets
Because our experience showed that people-to-people contact helped North Americans care about other parts of the world, we knew our development education program could take advantage of our 50 year history of direct communications. Our office was rich with the stories, photos, drawings and reports from sponsored children, their families, our international staff and town or village leaders. Read More >>
It was exciting to get word of the lawsuit launched this month by former client Women’s Voices for the Earth (WVE) and a number of other environmental groups. EarthJustice launched the suit on their behalf against well known cleaning product manufacturers who have been flouting New York State’s strong labeling laws.
“The bottom line is that hazardous ingredients that have not been tested for long-term health impacts, like asthma or even birth defects, are being used in some cleaning products,” said Erin Switalski, executive director of Women’s Voices for the Earth. “Consumers have a right to know if they are spraying their kids’ high chairs with toxic chemicals. Without full ingredient disclosure from these companies, there’s simply no way to be sure.” (From SustainableBusiness.COM)
Unfortunately, you won’t find WVE listed at a big rating sight like CharityNavigator because they don’t meet its income levels (less than $500,000 in public donations, $1 million total budget). Yet. (that’s where you can help.)
Thankfully, a number of smaller private foundations understand the essential role that an organization like WVE plays in knitting together women’s health and environmental concerns.
Despite its small size, WVE has played an important role in getting manufacturers like OPI and Clorox to clean up their products.
I’ve seen this passionate band up close and can testify to its worthiness and its leanness. It could use a lot less of the lean. And more of your green.
Please don’t assume that just because an organization isn’t showing up on a rating site that it automatically should be excluded from your consideration. Dig deeper. You’ll find some real treasures out there.
Back in the 80s, I was director of development and communications for the US affiliate of an international child sponsorship organization.
Keeping the advertising, invoicing, fundraising, and donor stewardship running was an expensive investment for an organization that relied primarily on monthly giving from tens of thousands of donors.
While that funding model was clearly our strength, it also lost us donors who determined which organization they chose to support solely on the basis of overhead ratios. Because we didn’t have lots of low-fundraising-cost government grants and commodities passing through our books, our overhead costs were already slightly higher than our colleague agencies that did.
(Note: Why overhead ratios tell only a tiny part of the story).
In particular, we had our eye on “development education” grant funds awarded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Those funds supported programs that taught US audiences about global issues, especially those facing the world’s most poor and vulnerable people. We wanted to expand our outreach in this area but those tight overhead ratios were stopping us.
We also saw that those agencies that received USAID development education grants seemed to have a “more favored” status than those of us who didn’t. We wanted to be in the “in crowd.” Being “in” often led to more media exposure, more opportunity for partnerships with our colleagues, and, ultimately, more donors and more funding to support our programs overseas.
But year after year (before I arrived), our proposals kept getting rejected. And we couldn’t understand why.
And to put the frosting on the cake, we kept hearing the funder and our non-sponsorship colleagues talk about the need to personalize international development for US citizens by sharing the stories of communities and families overseas.
But but but… each and every day, we were sending very real and personalized stories about those very same communities and families to tens of thousands of donors in the US.
What were we doing wrong?
Lesson One: Get involved with your colleagues
Luckily, my boss was determined to shift the perception of our agency in the eyes of his international colleagues. So he became very active in the US international development community. He joined committees in strategic networks. He lobbied our international program staff to participate in the US as well. He brought onto our Board of Directors individuals with international development expertise and got them involved in those networks as well.
Through those activities, he also got to work with and come to know the staff in the development education division at USAID. And that’s how we learned what was wrong with us.
Lesson Two: Find out what funders think about you.
Without getting into too much detail, suffice it to say that child sponsorship organizations like ours — the ones that invested in active communications between donors here in the US and their sponsored families overseas — were not seen by many of their colleagues as serious international development organizations. Read More >>
I was scrolling through TED talks today when I stumbled on this hopeful talk by Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain.
In describing the underpinnings of the Internet, Zittrain imagines a society with fewer rules enabling more neighborly acts.
His talks bring to mind the extraordinarily peaceful 15 years of WaterFire Providence, which brings thousands and thousands of individuals out on a summer’s evening to experience this inspirational work of public art and community.
If you need a smile and your heart warmed, take the time to watch this video.
As Tuesday’s post explains, after my first critique, Guidestar changed their hastily constructed home page listing Top Ten Relief Organizations Working in Haiti, which I strongly debated the evidence for, to a somewhat more accurate Most Reviewed Relief Organizations in Haiti.
After a long conversation this afternoon with Debra Snider, Guidestar’s VP of Communications and Administration, and Shari Ilsen, Director of Marketing and Outreach at GreatNonprofits, Guidestar made the laudable decision to drop the listing altogether.
Now when you land on Guidestar’s homepage and scroll down, you’ll see Disaster Action Center and encouragement to post a review if you have firsthand experience with an organization working in Haiti. A link takes you to the site of GreatNonprofits.
Evening update. I just discovered the press release sent out by Guidestar and GreatNonprofits touting their reviews. How do you spell “No Shame?” Seems it may be time to follow the money to see who benefits.
UPDATE from this afternoon: As a result of Tweeting, Guidestar has now changed the title of the list discussed in this blog to more accurately reflect what it is: “Most Reviewed Relief Organizations in Haiti.” If a handful of reviews qualify as “most.”
I was doing a bit of research today that required me to look up a few organizations in GuideStar.
Imagine my surprise to find on Guidestar’s home page the following list:
“Top Ten Relief Organizations Working In Haiti”
Wow! That’s quite a claim. What was their criteria for picking these 10 out of all the other NGOs they listed as doing work in Haiti?
Guidestar goes on to say under that amazing headline: “Donors, clients, and volunteers have identified these nonprofits as the most effective working in Haiti.” Hmm.
So I clicked the button “learn more or write reviews.”
You may not have heard of GreatNonprofits yet. I hadn’t until they were named in a holiday giving press release put out by a consortium of third party intermediaries that have been setting themselves up as the “go to” rating places if you want the skinny on nonprofit effectiveness. (You can see my rants on this in prior blog posts like “Join a lively debate on rating nonprofit societal outcomes” or others under the effectiveness tab.)
GreatNonprofits invites donors, clients and volunteers to do little reviews of the nonprofits they support or have benefited from. Anyone can go online and write a review and choose the number of stars they’d like to give to that nonprofit. Kind of like the ratings on Amazon.
So I clicked through to read the reviews of some of the organizations that were listed by Guidestar in the Top 10 and some that weren’t in the Top 10 but also seemed to have 5 Stars, the top rating.
I admit it. I didn’t click on every nonprofit. But the ones that I did, that were listed in the Top 10, had ONLY 1 or 2 Reviews. That’s it.
But some of the NGOs that didn’t make the Top 10 list also had the same number of stars and same number of reviews. For example, World Vision International had five stars and two donor reviews (as of 3:55 pm EST today) and they were in the Top Ten list. PLAN USA had five stars and two donor reviews and they were not listed as being in the top 10 list.
And some of the donor reviews had nothing to do with Haiti. Assuming they really are donors, right? I mean, who’s to say that the reviews aren’t the work of a PR firm hired to write the reviews. Or fund development staff?
When I suggested on Twitter (you can find the conversation by searching @gaylegifford) that it was absolutely shameful for Guidestar and GreatNonprofits to be naming a top ten list based on 1 or 2 donor reviews, GreatNonprofits replied:
@gaylegifford its a new site-we need more reviews 2 build the resource. U can help by spreading the word 2 post at http://bit.ly/gnpdisaster
It’s pretty obvious to all that they need more reviews to even begin to have a credible claim. That is, if you buy the whole idea that rating NGO effectiveness is the same as reviewing a book or toaster, which I don’t. It’s not that I don’t think that feedback from donors et al isn’t helpful. Caveat emptor on that.
But to then take those skimpy reviews and definitively name a top ten list of effectiveness based on the handful of reviews and the handful of organizations reviewed, I’m still shaking my head.
By the way, shouldn’t there be some distinction made between what donors say and what clients or volunteers have to say?
But what irresponsible hubris to make a claim about NGO effectiveness in a disaster of this magnitude based on what I might describe as a complete lack of credible information.
I’m not saying that some of the organizations on the list don’t deserve their rating . But I am saying that GreatNonprofits and Guidestar have absolutely no credibility if this is the criteria they are using to be telling donors or the media that their uninformed list is in the Top 10 in Relief.
None.
P.S. By the way, just because an NGO has done good work in Haiti in the past (e.g. a school) doesn’t mean it has the competency to do the type of relief work that is needed in a disaster of this magnitude. Or the capacity to handle huge amounts of short term aid.
What would be helpful is for those organizations that have been working on the ground for some time in Haiti to communicate with each other and with the world community how donations can best be used … for relief or for long term rebuilding.
