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.
“Together we must learn to live together or we will perish as fools…
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. … There is … nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum—and livable—income for every American family…”
” … Our only hope today lies in our ability to … go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism …
“… We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now … Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’ ”
It’s hard to be hard-headed about giving to Haiti when people are hungry, thirsty and injured. But before you reflexively hit the DONATE NOW FOR HAITI button on the first email (or text message) you see, take a moment to consider your own values. Even in emergencies, perhaps most of all in emergencies, it’s important to try to give in ways that can help to avert similar disasters in the future.
Timothy A. Wise reminds us that “aid is power” in his 2005 blog posting Humanitarian Crises: What is a Progressive to Do? A lot of American aid power goes, intentionally or unintentionally, to helping entrench American businesses and exports at the expense of local products and producers. Food aid often winds up driving local produce and producers out of business. Reconstruction contracts with international construction firms undercut local professionals, builders and workers. Wise advises sticking with agencies which were present before the crisis and will stick around later and those with clear strategies to build local capacity.
I visited Haiti twice, in 1989 and again in 1995 and I know how difficult life there can be at the best of times. Now, in the very worst of times, Haiti needs our help to survive and recover.
MSF has medical staff on the ground in Port-au-Prince. Although all three of their Port-au-Prince hospitals were destroyed, they will be setting up an inflatable hospital in the next day. I once visited a MSF hospital in rural Haiti. It was an oasis of compassion and care.
We can only hope that this catastrophe will be the very bottom of the seemingly endless well of misery this poor nation has suffered. Perhaps now, the U.S. and the world will turn away from interventions and imposed solutions and support Haitians in reconstruction. That work must literally be “from the ground up” since so much of Haiti’s land has been ruined by deforestation and erosion
My client Grassroots International does exactly that kind of development. In the years ahead, Haiti will need programs like GRI’s on a much wider scale to achieve food self-sufficiency and the long-term prosperity it deserves.
I was just re-reading the report released last January this time “Call to Service Assessment 2008: Community Volunteer Service Needs and Opportunities; July – September 2008″ of Serve Rhode Island (the RI Commission on National and Community Service).
Among other things, I was struck by the data on where volunteers spend their time. According to statistics gathered by the US Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics and reported here:
At first glance I was somewhat surprised that fundraising was at the top of the volunteer activity list given the number of complaints I hear from organizations about their inability to recruit volunteers to help them raise funds. (Don’t the choices of volunteer activities seem pretty limited.)
But when activities are matched against the top places where volunteers serve — overwhelmingly education and religious groups — the numbers made much more sense.
If you think about the legions of parents who raise money for their kids’ schools, or run events and raise money for their religious congregations, it’s not too surprising that fundraising might come out on top.
Unfortunately, what the study doesn’t tell us is the relationship of the volunteering to the amount of funds raised. Now that would be a number worth gathering.
I never expected that I’d jump right into the New Year’s blog by joining a lively debate of proposed new rating systems for nonprofit societal outcomes.
Hildy is making the case for measuring community-wide outcomes first, rather than isolating individual nonprofits and ascribing outcomes to them. Ken and colleague Robert Penna argue back that most nonprofits work on individual or family level outcomes and thus their impact can be isolated and measured.
Is that true? Perhaps to some extent. But really, how effective can a community mental health organization be in serving the needs of its clients when they may be recently laid off, facing foreclosure, and unsure of their next meal? How effective is even the best of schools or classroom teachers when their students face these same concerns?
I’ve been reading Michael Pollan’s book In defense of food over my vacation. I’m struck by the comparisons between the inadequacy of reductionist science to evaluate food and its impact on our health and the similar challenge of ascribing definitive causality to a particular nonprofit intervention wholly independent of other factors (including the quality of the implementers and not just the selection of implementation method).
You can read my comments and add your own at today’s Open Forum on Ken’s Commentary.
