Posts Tagged ‘evaluation’
Posted by Gayle Gifford on October 8, 2009 in Better Boards, Effectiveness
Are you ready to be rated on your results?
There is a snowball gathering momentum and mass rolling down the hill in the USA. Your board needs to pay attention to it now.
That snowball is the growing movement by independent intermediaries to develop simple rating systems for the very complex world of nonprofit performance and social impact.
As charitable giving has grown to over $300 billion annually in the US, it seems that the business world is now taking great interest. Those individuals who brought you the financial crisis have now decided that most charitable giving is misdirected (see this Fox Business News clip and you’ll get the picture). What the public really needs, they believe, are unbiased “intermediaries” to redirect charitable giving to the “best performing” nonprofits.
Funders are focused on measuring and publicizing nonprofit outcomes
A 2008 study released by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, called “The Nonprofit Marketplace: Bridging the Information Gap in Philanthropy,” outlines the desired objective:
“…a more efficient and effective nonprofit market would direct more funds to solving the world’s social problems faster and at a lower cost, thereby helping more people sooner. Reallocating just 10 percent of the current $300 billion annual fund flow to the best performers would have a similar effect as raising billions in new funds — with nowhere near the same cost in fundraising time and energy.”
Now, as much as I want to debate those assumptions, the train has already left the station.
For example, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has already provided seed funding to an organization called GiveWell which they are promoting on their website. They describe GiveWell as
“the sometimes controversial … independent, nonprofit evaluator of nonprofit organizations. A self appointed watchdog, it performs in-depth research to help people accomplish as much good as possible with their donations.”
Who are GiveWell? As listed on their web profiles, their staff are former hedge fund employees and recent college graduates (who appear to have little-to-no nonprofit experience). They boast on their website that they have already evaluated 500 nonprofits and only found four worthy of their top ranking!
While you may not have heard of GiveWell, you’ve probably heard of Charity Navigator. Ken Berger, its thoughtful President and CEO, has heard the criticisms of its 4 star ratings which assess only financial indicators and not nonprofit program performance.
Mr. Berger is aware of the criticisms of Charity Navigator’s limited perspective and determined
“to transform our evaluation system of charities to include two additional dimensions (beyond financial health) – accountability (including transparency) and outcomes.”(Emphasis added). Read more here
Charity Navigator has appointed an advisory group to help it design its system.
Is your organization attempting to measure outcomes at all?
We all know that measuring outcomes is one of the hardest tasks that most nonprofits and social benefit organizations face. And one of the most controversial.
Just look at the maelstrom stirred up by the US government’s No Child Left Behind Act which tests students to assess public school performance. Critics of the testing process point out many shortcomings including school cheating, lack of similar standards across states, the failure to test Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on July 28, 2009 in Big ideas, Effectiveness, Fundraising
A robust sector includes nonprofits big and small and in-between. Keep repeating that.
In her latest op ed piece in The Nonprofit Quarterly, “Mom and Pop Giving Over to Big Brother?,” editor-in-chief Ruth McCambridge, shares our concern about national trends that overlook the value of “small, locally controlled organizations to civic life.”
She goes on to note that small businesses have disproportionately shed jobs in this recession and cites examples that indicate that this may be the result of government policy directing recovery funds toward the biggest corporations and away from the small guys. Ruth worries whether this will be repeated for nonprofits as this Administration works with “large philanthropic organizations to craft … approaches to ’social innovation.’”
We have raised the same question in different forms in this blog . See Now I’m Worried – Who decides what is effective and who should be funded or Are nonprofits only safety nets? among other entries.
If we get too caught up in focusing funder attention on “taking programs to scale,” we are destined to overlook the critical community building that can only be done by small, in-the-neighborhood organizations. Or, those scale-ups may overlook the impact of design that is an adaptation to local circumstances that doesn’t scale well or shouldn’t be scaled but should be redesigned for a new locale or new population. Or, even more likely, we may tend to forget that social change depends on a continuum of organizations, people and actions to finally tip power balances and produce desired improvements.
Thanks to The Nonprofit Quarterly for using its national platform to continue to remind the top of the nonprofit infrastructure that this is a complicated world and that the contributions of the little guys can’t be dismissed or ignored.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on April 13, 2009 in 100 Things We've Learned, Big ideas, Effectiveness, Great quotes, Strategic Thinking
“Beware of geeks bearing formulas.” Warren Buffet’s quote in Wired Magazine on the formula that led to the downfall of Wall Street was aptly quoted by Phil Buchanan, the Executive Director of the Center for Effective Philanthropy in an exchange on the Tactical Philanthropy blog.
This reminds me of a quote in Boards that Make A Difference by governance guru John Carver that has always stuck in my head. “A crude measure of the right thing beats a precise measure of the wrong thing.”
All this was stirred up for me by the recent buzz within the world of philanthropy for measures to better direct donor giving to “what works.”
There is a real danger in oversimplifying what works.
While I’m completely in favor of focusing the attention of our sector toward processes that produce real community results, I’m wary of reliance on simplistic nonprofit rating systems (e.g. GiveWell) that attempt to duplicate for mission effectiveness the same style of rating formulas that Charity Navigator and others use to rank nonprofits by their financial metrics. We already know that judging a nonprofit solely upon the percentage of program expenses tells us nothing about community results and, in many cases, not even a terribly lot about nonprofit financial effectiveness.
How can we better use the indicators that do exist to influence whole systems change and not just randomized philanthropic endeavors? Read More >>
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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 July 27, 2008 in Fundraising, Good reads, Tidbits
You’ll find new tools for evaluation, program planning, and strategic planning in the Toolbox section of our website. Also, Gayle’s latest article for Contributions Magazine, “Do Sweat the Small Stuff When It Comes to Your Donors,” is available in the Articles Section of our site, along many more articles on boards, fundraising and communications.
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