Charity Navigator - President & CEO's Report for February 2013. The First Step Toward a Measure of Outcome On December 8, 2008 I posted a blog on Ken's Commentary titled, “A Measure of Outcome”. In that blog entry I discussed the critical importance of knowing the outcomes of the work of charities and made the following promise, “we are setting a goal over time of offering an expanded rating system to more comprehensively evaluate nonprofits and separate great organizations from the rest”.
Over the intervening years we have been working hard to do just that. The launch of CN 2.0 in 2011 was a step in that direction. However, on January 23, 2013 we took our greatest leap forward in that effort. We launched the new Results Reporting dimension to our evaluation of charities (the overall system is now called CN 3.0 and includes three dimensions – (1) financial health, (2) accountability & transparency, and (3) results reporting).
I think that sums it all up in a nutshell. All the best, Ken. Local Forces for Good. The authors of the influential book Forces for Good examine how their framework for creating high-impact nonprofits applies to local and smaller organizations. (Illustration by Chi Birmingham) Of the more than 1.5 million nonprofits in the United States, the vast majority are local groups striving to achieve maximum results while operating on budgets well under $1 million. Most aim to deepen their impact within the local community, rather than increase their reach by scaling up nationally. So how do the six practices outlined in our book Forces for Good apply to smaller groups, when we originally studied only large national and global nonprofits such as Habitat for Humanity, Teach for America, and the Environmental Defense Fund? During the five years since our book was published, this was the question we most frequently encountered as we shared our ideas with thousands of organizations, including many smaller, locally focused nonprofits with modest budgets. 1. 2. 3. 4.
Seven Deadly Sins of Impact Evaluation. Seven obstacles to making good decisions about impact evaluations and how to avoid them. Impact evaluations—typically, third-party studies that seek to prove a program model’s effectiveness—seem to be all the rage in social sector circles these days. Maybe in part that’s because the process seems so straightforward: Just commission one when the time is right, and, when all goes well, proudly show off your “stamp of approval.” You’ll soon receive the resources you need to grow your organization and to influence all the other nonprofits in your field. The problem is that it’s rarely that simple in practice. Consider one youth-serving organization we know, which undertook an impact evaluation—at great expense and with high visibility to its funders—only to have the process cut short when the evaluators discovered that the organization’s numerous sites were implementing its program model in wildly different ways.
Did that nonprofit have growth potential? Yes. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Five Levers for Social Change: Part 1. Practical Advice Series: Five basic “levers,” or strategies, to help businesses or nonprofits achieve social change. Your organization probably has the core competencies to accomplish meaningful change; the hardest part is identifying the appropriate strategy and resources to get the job done. Here at Taproot, we’ve found it easier to break down the process of larger social change into five basic “levers,” or strategies, that any business or nonprofit can use.
By parsing goals into smaller, manageable, and realistic parts, and by focusing on near-term accomplishments rather than long-term solutions, achieving enduring and effective social change is possible. Looking across the world of philanthropy and social activism, we can see how these levers have been instrumental in sparking enduring and transformative change. Over a series of posts, I’ll describe each lever and share examples of organizations that have benefitted from employing it.
First up: bright spots. Money for Good Study: Sharing Information About Your Org’s Results Can Attract More Donors. GuideStar and Hope Consulting have released the results of new study, Money for Good II (MFGII). The findings suggest that if nonprofits are more transparent in sharing information about their results online that they could attract more donors. The research found that two-thirds of individuals do not typically research the organizations they donate to compared those that advise donors and foundation grant-makers do due dilligence on every dollar they contribute.
Despite these different approaches – giving from the heart versus the head – both groups want a broad range of information on the nonprofits’ impact, financials, anad legitimacy. The study also states that donors want to be able to obtain this information from third-party portals and 53 percent of donors survyed want to use such sites.
There is a high demand for data that shows how the nonprofit has been effective and made an impact. Paul Light: Survival of the Fittest Wrong Path for Nonprofits and Communities. March 10, 2011; Source: The Washington Post | In the Washington Post last week, Dr. Paul Light sounded an alarm about the laissez faire attitude of the sector as a whole to the failure of a few in its midst. Light does not argue with the fact that winnowing may occur as a result of the sector's continuing financial straights – what he is very concerned about is the real possibility that the wrong organizations will go under. This could, he asserts, result in "service deserts" in many low-income communities.
Some of these communities are served by relatively small nonprofits that have already been hollowed out by the last two years of downturn, he says. As NPQ has tracked the trends in the sector, we cannot but agree. The Top 40 Most Innovative International Development Organizations. April 25, 2011; Source: Devex | The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation is one of the international aid organizations recently recognized as the 40 most innovative groups in the development aid field by Devex, a widely used development aid news and job board service. Devex surveyed 2,149 of its members to come up with a list of top innovators in four categories of organizations: donor, implementing NGO, consultancy and advocacy group. Devex acknowledges a self-selection bias in the sample, due to the limitation of responses to Devex members motivated to respond, and a tendency to pick large, well-known organizations like the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, because it would be unlikely that equally innovative small organizations would be as widely known to development professionals and aid workers around the world.
Donor organizations Advocacy organizations Implementer organizations After the poll, Devex asked the winners what they thought made them innovative. Athletes’ Charities: What Part Self Promotion? January 17, 2011; Source: The Dallas Morning News | A recent review by The Dallas Morning News of charities sponsored by local athletes and sports teams found that more than half missed “efficiency goals suggested for the nation's best large charities,” according to the paper.
Part of the problem say observers, is that too many young athletes set up their own nonprofit rather than working through already established entities. The proposition of setting up one’s own foundation appears to have a number of benefits for young players beyond simply “giving back” to the community or even burnishing a player’s image. It theoretically could also provide a way to acquire management skills and network among other leaders who are also often involved in philanthropy. For instance, Michael Bennett, who has two sons in the NFL, says setting up a nonprofit is often a mix of charity and self-promotion. "If you're running a foundation, you'll make the right connects . . . Charity Navigator - Top Ten Lists. At Charity Navigator, we recognize that charity evaluation may not be the most scintillating of topics for most observers. That said, we are constantly searching for ways to help givers navigate a crowded marketplace, and to make this often-complex subject a tad more interesting.
In the following Top 10 Lists, we identify those charities in our database that meet certain desirable or undesirable patterns of performance. As with all of our ratings of charities, the inclusion of each charity in this list is based entirely on whether or not it matched the criteria we defined for the list. In other words, we included charities based on how they performed in our rating system, not on our subjective opinions of those charities.
Furthermore, our lists are dynamic. <a href=" What's Your Non-Profit's Bottom Line? From Guest Blogger Nick Cooney. Nick is the author of "Change Of Heart: What Psychology Can Teach Us About Spreading Social Change" (www.ChangeOfHeartBook.com), and the founder and director of The Humane League, an animal advocacy organization based in Philadelphia, PA. Is your non-profit succeeding in its mission? How can you tell? Large for–profit corporations spend millions of dollars each year gathering data to compare the success of different approaches in advertising, audience targeting and product offerings. Dear Pepsi Shareholders, This has been a very successful year for us indeed! As laughable as such a letter would sound coming from a large corporation, for many non-profits this type of analysis represents the farthest they’ve gone in measuring their impact.
Anecdotes and reports of our non-profit's raw output can’t give us clear insight into how much good we've done. What exactly is the bottom line for non-profit organizations? A Facebook Founder Begins a Social Network Focused on Charities. Charity Navigator Adjusts Ratings System for Recession. November 30, 2010; Source: South Florida Business Journal | NPQ has written a number of newswires on the recession related problems some nonprofits are having with the rating system used by Charity Navigator. Now 97 of the 5,500 nonprofits Charity Navigator rates have had their ratings raised by the watchdog after it looked more carefully at the “negative impact that the recession has had on certain types of nonprofits.” Two parts of the formula have been adjusted—a charity’s average revenue growth over the last three to five years and a charity’s average increase in spending on programs over the last three to five years.
The types of nonprofits that have had their ratings adjusted are museums, fundraising organizations, and religious groups, which were all adjusted based on both revenue growth and program spending. Community foundations were adjusted just on revenue growth. The names of the 97 upgraded organizations can be accessed here. To Help Donors Choose, Web Site Alters How It Sizes Up Charities. NPQ: A United Way Quandary in Syracuse. Ken's Commentary: Financial Measures and Beyond.
Rare attack on Harlem Children's Zone - Class Struggle. These days, it is not a stretch to see New York City educator and social reformer Geoffrey Canada as the modern equivalent of Clara Barton, and his Harlem Children’s Zone as groundbreaking as the early Red Cross. A series of American Express television ads and two school documentaries, “The Lottery” and “Waiting for Superman,” offer Canada as the answer to poverty and ignorance in urban America, which he may prove to be.
President Obama has requested $210 million to create similar social safety net zones in cities across the country. That’s a lot of money, but how can anyone oppose prenatal care, parenting classes, fitness and nutrition programs for poor families, as well as the thriving charter schools Canada and his team have created? So it is hard to believe what I am seeing -- a short paper from the prestigious Brookings Institution taking a shot at the Harlem Children’s Zone and its premier charter school, the Promise Academy.