My post on Tuesday, “My worst nightmare is now true, sloppy ratings ratings of nonprofit effectiveness in Hatii,” and a storm of Tweets generated quite a bit of attention.

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.

Why is this so much better?

• Guidestar is no longer implying that simply because 10 organizations received more reviews than 25 others that the reviewed organizations are somehow more worthy of your giving. (My point: Once they call out a top list, even if they don’t say it directly, the donor infers that somehow this list is more special than the rest).

• Dropping   “received the most reviews” eliminated the task of keeping that list revolving and accurate. (It wasn’t.)

• As Guidestar’s intent was to help increase the number of reviews received by GreatNonprofits, this new configuration achieves the same goal without the baggage of implied ratings. I’d also suggest that it is clearer and probably will be more effective at accomplishing that goal.

• Guidestar can still offer the longer informational list they compiled of organizations that are working on relief and recovery (or longer term development) in Haiti, without trying to assess their effectiveness. This doesn’t compromise Guidestar’s valued credibility and keeps up what Guidestar is best known for — providing us with credible information on organizations and educating us about how we can make our own informed giving decisions.

Do I still have concerns about Amazon style rating systems? Absolutely. But we can talk about that at another time.

Thank you, Guidestar (and Debra), for hearing my concerns — which aren’t just my concerns, but include a rising tide of very concerned individuals with deep reservations about intermediary rating systems of nonprofit effectiveness.

P.S. You can also read a quick summary of the controversy in today’s Give and Take, the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s roundup of blogs about the nonprofit world.

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’ve sent my money for emergency help to Medicins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders), and can confidently recommend them as a good way to help.

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.