Archive for the ‘Research’ Category
Posted by Gayle Gifford on February 20, 2009 in Big ideas, Nonprofit Highlights, Research
I went back to www.GivingMarketPlaces.org today to see if they had answered my question about the data used in the report I mentioned a few days ago The Nonprofit Marketplace: Bridging the Information Gap in Philanthropy. In the way that the web works, I found myself on the TacticalPhilanthropy Blog which mentioned that the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which partnered with McKinsey & Co to produce this report had funded an organization called GiveWell.
From what they say on their web site, GiveWell was founded and is staffed by some former hedge fund managers. They have set themselves up as an “independent evaluator” to do “detailed analysis” of nonprofit organizations and then to recommend to donors whether to give to those organizations or not.
GiveWell says they reviewed 136 nonprofits and only 4 came highly recommended! I was absolutely amazed by the list of organizations that were “Not Recommended” for donor giving including the American Red Cross, UNICEF, Technoserve, and the Girl Scout Council of Greater New York.
It appears that the primary reason most organizations were “Not Recommended” was because they didn’t give GIveWell the right kind of information. I doesn’t surprise me that such an internationally respected Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on December 19, 2008 in Big ideas, Research
Don Griesmann reminded me today in his blog about one of my pet year end peeves… the charity ratings that pop up in magazines like Forbes or are published on self-proclaimed watchdog sites like Charity Navigator. (I get particularly incensed at a business magazine editor claiming to know what the most effective charities are — give me a break.) With just under a million public charities in the US, there is no way that anyone could possibly know of every charity that is doing a great job.
One enormous hole in these rating systems is the lack of a handy report to measure societal impact. And you know that these raters are not investigating each and every charity firsthand. So these rating systems are mostly based on the information that can be gleaned from the Form 990. This results in too much attention on finances, in particular the ratio of program vs management/fundraising expenditures.
While it is a noble pursuit to try to help the public make more informed decisions about the charities they donate to, unfortunately, there is no easy rating system for measuring community benefit.? Here’s the problem with using low overhead as the determinate of effectiveness: Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on September 26, 2008 in Fundraising, Nonprofit Highlights, Public engagement, Research
I spent an hour yesterday in a lively phone conversation with the drafters of “Drowning in Paperwork, Distracted from Purpose” a report on the challenges and opportunities in improving grant application and reporting. The call was hosted by the Association of Fundraising Professionals which is one of the partner organizations participating in Project Streamline, a collaborative initiative of the Grants Managers Network.
Though I’ve already referenced this effort in an earlier posting, I wanted to remind you to go the the website of Project Streamline, download a copy of the report and its recommendations, and add your feedback to the discussion.
Some of the things we talked about on our conference call:
The need to rightsize the application process to the amount of the grant.
The need to focus proposal writing on the right stuff, (program and results), and not take up time with excessive paperwork.
The need for better online application processes (ones where you can save your document, copy and paste, print out versions to check, etc).
The need for open source final reports so that our colleagues can learn from our experiences (rather than reports locked in a file cabinet that no one pays attention to).
The report is a good read. It may confirm all of your frustrations. If a fair amount of your revenues come through private foundation grants, it’s well worth your involvement, especially if you have recommended solutions to the problems addressed.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of grants and contracts which nonprofits receive come through the government … which isn’t a beneficiary of this study. But the project sponsors were urged to share the report with government grantmakers anyway as they may benefit from its recommendations.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on August 18, 2008 in Fundraising, Research, Tidbits
Have you been wondering how effective email fundraising campaigns are? M&R Strategic Services and NTEN have released a eNonprofit Benchmarks Study that you can download for free.
An interesting stat from the report about online fundraising: In the 21 non profits participating in the study, the average email fundraising response rate was 0.13% in 2007 with an average gift of $87.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on August 7, 2008 in Little ideas, Research
Sitting in the file cabinets of most foundations are hundreds of thousands of final reports from grantees on projects funded by those foundations.
For some time I’ve been thinking that it is a shame that all that great learning is locked away, inaccessible from others who might put those lessons to good use.
Call it Open Source grant reporting.
My dream is to see all those reports made available on the web. Imagine that you’re sitting in Iowa and thinking about launching an arts mentoring program for high school students. Wouldn’t it be great if your initial googling would not only surface the names of other nonprofits that run arts mentoring programs for you to call, but also produced links to the dozens of reports reflecting on arts mentoring programming from start up to roll out?
I can picture researchers mining these reports and preparing national “lessons learned” papers that can be shared across the industry. Or program officers skipping right away to implement “what worked” rather than rehashing the same missteps and dead ends.
Kudos to those foundations and others who make their final reports available to their colleagues throughout the US. But why wait for the foundations. What if nonprofits posted their own grant project reports on the web to share with their colleagues?
Insanity you say? Who would want to expose themselves in this way?
Even just having short summaries on the web to tempt us would be a great start. Then we could “call for a copy of the full report.”
What do you think? Doable?
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on August 4, 2008 in Big ideas, Nonprofit Highlights, Public engagement, Research, Strategic Thinking
Before network weaving and social capital became the buzz words, the John H. Chafee Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor was quietly inventing collaboration and community building on a bi-state scale in their small corner of New England.
I wanted to unearth the case study about the Corridor as I believe that nonprofits and their funding partners can learn a lot from their story.
The John H. Chafee Blackstone River Valley Heritage Corridor spans 24 cities and towns in Connecticut and Massachusetts. It is the cradle of the industrial revolution in America, the story of the technological and economic shift from field to factory Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on July 24, 2008 in Big ideas, Nonprofit Highlights, Research, Strategic Thinking
I joined a group of colleagues Tuesday night to talk more about Passion & Purpose, 
the recent report from The Boston Foundation.
A number of questions emerged that are worth a conversation among our colleagues and with nonprofit funders. I’d like to share those with you:
- Is this the right model for evaluating the financial health of nonprofits?
- Do we agree with this assessment and presentation of the issues and recommendations? Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on June 20, 2008 in Big ideas, Research
I’m continuing to digest the report Passion & Purpose issued this month by The Boston Foundation – the report analyzes the financial health of nonprofits in Massachusetts and makes a series of recommendations for the sector.
As I mentioned in my first post, the report lumps all nonprofits with budgets above $250,000 and below $50 million into one category that the authors call “Safety Nets.”
I have a very hard time reducing the performing arts, historical societies, art museums, conservation, environmental education, youth development, international development, philanthropy, peace and justice, women’s rights, and civil rights, to name a few, to the descriptor “Safety Net.” To me, this characterization grossly diminishes the societal benefit that these types of organizations provide. Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on June 16, 2008 in Big ideas, Research
The Boston Foundation released a study of Massachusetts Nonprofits called Passion and Purpose: Raising the Fiscal Fitness Bar for Massachusetts Nonprofits.
The report is worth looking at, even if you aren’t from the Bay State, as it provides a very intriguing analysis of nonprofits by size and business model. The report categorizes the sector into three segments based on budget size and “value proposition” as follows:
Grassroots organizations create civil society through grassroots action and volunteerism. They have budgets below $250,000.
Safety net nonprofits provide a societal benefit and a “safety net” through the delivery of services and quality of life contributions. They have budgets between $250,000 and $50 million.
Economic Engines provide large scale services and contributions to the state’s economic health and competitiveness. These are the largest institutions, primarily universities and hospitals (60%), that represent just 2% of nonprofit numbers but 80% of assets and 72% of their spending. (GG: It’s interesting to me that the description of these economic engines says nothing about their charitable purpose. Why is that?)
Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on June 11, 2008 in Big ideas, Fundraising, Research
Research from the Bridgestar group raises a question about the prevailing belief that successful nonprofits diversify their revenue bases.
The article is called “How Nonprofits Get Really Big” and was published by the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Here’s what the research found in brief:
“Since 1970, more than 200,000 nonprofits have opened in the U.S., but only 144 of them have reached $50 million in annual revenue. Most of the members of this elite group got big by doing two things. They raised the bulk of their money from a single type of funder such as corporations or government, and not, as conventional wisdom would recommend, by going after diverse sources of funding. Just as importantly, these nonprofits created professional organizations that were tailored to the needs of their primary funding sources.”
Hmm.glg
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