Partnership with GuideStar
I am very excited to tell you about a new partnership between GreatNonprofits and Guidestar that we think will help nonprofits get more visibility and attract more volunteers and supporters.
As a result of our partnership, reviews posted on GreatNonprofits will also be seen on GuideStar.org later this Fall. In addition to this, GuideStar has some tremendous other new developments that will be unveiled in the Fall - watch for it!
This summer, we're working closely together to get the message out. We recently co-hosted the after-hour party at the CompassPoint conference in San Francisco. And GuideStar invited us to co-exhibit at the AMA Nonprofit conference in DC last week. Look for us and GuideStar making the rounds this summer!
New Outreach Managers !
I'm so excited to introduce our new outreach managers. They are smart, articulate, and dedicated to the nonprofit community. Allison, Sarah, Erin, Caroline, Lisa, Amanda, and Kathleen are all Stanford students.
They are being led by our intrepid Shari Ilsen and Sujata Shayam. Sujata was part of the team that did the outreach in Pittsburgh, PA and we're thrilled to have her rejoin us for this launch. More bios and pics of everyone here: http://www.greatnonprofits.org/team
The outreach managers did a week long orientation with activities and speakers such as Bruce Sievers. They visited GoodWill industries and Delancey Street restaurant in San Francisco and volunteered at Glide.
Now, they will be helping nonprofits to collect reviews from their stakeholders. Lisa and Sarah went on their first site visit this week to Peninsula Bridge Program where they collected reviews from Spanish-speaking parents of the kids in the program. Lisa has studied in Chile and Madrid and was able to speak to the parents and translate their stories. See http://www.greatnonprofits.org/user/1380
I'm going to be inviting these stellar outreach managers to post on this site about their experience. Drop Shari a line, if you can use the help of one of our outreach managers to come to you and help you collect reviews from your volunteers, clients or other stakeholders.
Perla
Head or Heart When Appealing to Donors?
There is no doubt that attracting and retaining donors is front of mind for all nonprofits, particularly given the struggles of our current economy. Beyond the traditional methods, some new players in the sector have developed online applications for reaching out to donors. Interestingly, however, these Internet-based approaches can differ quite dramatically in how they woo potential givers. Two organizations in particular come at donors from almost opposite angles: one strikes at the heads of donors, with a more investment advisor approach, using statistics, measurements and hard data; the other strikes at individuals’ hearts, using stories and ratings to intrigue donors. Although both would probably agree that, in reality, donors rely on a mix of the two in making their charitable giving decisions.
Winning their hearts According to Wharton professor Deborah Small, organizations that want to raise money should appeal to the hearts of potential donors, not their heads. The study she conducted, along with co-authors George Loewensteinb and Paul Slovic, shows that when making charitable gifts, “most people probably do not calculate the expected benefit of their donation. Rather, choices are made intuitively, based on spontaneous affective reactions."
Examples cited by the study include, according to the publication Knowledge@Wharton, “several well-known examples of large sums of money being donated to help identifiable victims. In 1987, a child named Jessica McClure, dubbed "Baby Jessica" by the news media, fell into a well near her home in Texas and received nearly $700,000 in donations from the public. Ali Abbas, a boy who lost both his arms and his parents in the Iraq War in 2003, was the subject of widespread media attention in Europe and received some $550,000 in donations. Even animals generate sympathy: In 2002, more than $48,000 was contributed to save Forgea, a dog stranded on a ship adrift in the Pacific Ocean.”
In the Knowledge article, Small suggests that there are important take-aways from the study for charitable organizations. "It's all about putting together a simple, emotionally compelling message. The best way to do that is in the form of a picture or a story, something that purely engages the emotional system. The mistake that many charities make is trying to appeal both to emotion and to reason. They assume this would be more effective than appealing to only one or the other, but it isn't."
GreatNonprofits Perla Ni also believes that donors will respond best to the stirring stories of nonprofits, and founded the organization GreatNonprofits to enable nonprofit stories to be told. Founder and former publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Ni states on her organization’s website, “It struck me, as I struggled professionally to find great nonprofits for our magazine [Stanford Social Innovation Review] to write about, that there needed to be an online "Zagat," if you will, for nonprofits that would collect stories and reviews of people—people like me, the victims of Katrina, and hundreds of thousands of others—who have seen the impact of nonprofits up close, and can speak personally and firsthand about it.”
The mission of the organization is GreatNonprofits is to: • Help inspire and inform prospective donors and volunteers, help them differentiate between nonprofits, find ones that they trust, and be more confident in giving or signing up to volunteer. • Enable great nonprofits, regardless of the size of their marketing budget, to harness their most authentic and most effective advertising - the stories of the people they’ve served. • Promote greater nonprofit excellence through feedback and transparency.
GreatNonprofits uses a model similar to TripAdvisor, Epinions or Yelp that rely on people who have actually interacted with an organization to post reviews and ratings. In the case of GreatNonprofits, these people might be volunteers, board members, staff members or clients of the nonprofits. An example is the reviews of MusicLink Foundation from both clients and volunteers. So far, this charity has a five-star rating based on three reviews. Reviews of other nonprofits are not all positive, as clients who have less than satisfactory interactions are free to post their thoughts as well. Caroline Heine
Inequality in Giving- Interview with Rob Reich, Author of “A Failure of Philanthropy”
Perla: Rob, you've done a lot of research on how very little individual donations here in the U.S. actually go towards causes that serve the needs of the poor. Can you update us on your research on this inequality of giving?
Rob: It's proceeding on two fronts. First, I’m following up on the example I gave in the SSIR article about private giving to public schools in California. I have ten year database about every nonprofit in California that raises money for public schools. I'll be looking at the distribution of private dollars and their consequences.
Perla: I just recently realized that you used to be a teacher. Now it makes sense your interest in public schools.
Rob: Yes. I used to be a sixth grade teacher in Houston. And the second thing - I'm in the midst of writing a book looking at the simple and fundamental question about the role of the state in providing incentives to give money away. Why should the state provide any incentive for donations? I think the answer is not well developed or understood.
Perla: What's the response you get from donors when you present your research?
Rob: I often get a little bit of a surprise. In particular, people don't realize - even though it's quite consistent in the findings - that over half of all charitable dollars from individual donors to religion and faith-based charities that serve the poor, have already been carved out. The media has not done a good job of reporting this. And then with respect to the inequalities in giving, in the audiences that I talk to, there's often some thought that charity does have a role in serving the needs of the poor and disadvantaged. And they are surprised overall how little goes to the needy. My anecdotal experience matches up with the findings that the Google study presented - the intention that people have to give to the poor is widespread but not actualized in practice.
Perla: Why do you think that is?
Rob: The simple answer is that the most important reason people give money away is that they know already to give. Poor people are not asking rich people to give money away.
Perla: What can small and medium sized nonprofits who provide basic services for the poor do?
Rob: They should try to develop a development office. But that's a catch twenty-two- you need donation and overhead to get it off the ground. You can try to appeal to people's best intentions. Show statistics. But it shouldn't be the responsibility of people working in these nonprofits. This is a public policy problem. One of the public policy solutions is to provide a differentiated incentive structure. It makes sense to me to provide additional incentives, or diminish existing incentives for things that don't give to the poor. How to operationalize what that would look like is still unclear. I don't accept that this will politicize the deduction structure. There's already politics involved in defining what is 501C3 and 501C4 so we're not crossing a new threshold. The system makes distinctions between what organizations get tax benefits and which don’t
Perla: What are some things that can be done to raise awareness about this?
Rob: The media could do a better job reporting about it. The kind of high profile, glamour with which the media portray big ticket donations such as refurbishing cultural, medical institutions - I'd like to see similar attention paid to, say, the Robin Hood foundation or other organizations where the intention is to serve needs of the poor. But I don't want to make this a media problem or a nonprofit problem - this is a public policy issue. There are things that nonprofits and media should do, but this is mostly public policy problem.
Perla: Do donors also have some responsibility to be more aware of what they are giving to? I sometimes wonder if donors, because they tend to come from a different socio-economic background than the poor, whether they feel less comfortable being involved or giving to the poor?
Rob: I don't think it's a matter of donor psychology or stereotypes about the poor because there's been vast amounts of civil society efforts around the poor- some of which are paternalistic -but lots of activity and interest.
Perla: Do tax incentives matter?
Rob: Tax incentives do matter, especially for high income givers. But the majority of Americans - 70% don't even itemize - they don't take advantage of the deductions. The impact is less strong than initially thought.
Perla: Is there any other research you are working on that would be of interest to nonprofits?
Rob: Yes, I'm also working on whether the domestic poor or international poor are needier and whether the American poor have claim before the global poor? Does the tax deduction play a role in steering donations one way or another? The Gates foundation has a massive program for global giving. Lots of people criticize the U.S. government for the small percentage of money spent on global aid, but if you add all the U.S. philanthropy, it's a lot of money. However, the foreign aid budget is publically decided and private philanthropy isn't. The comparable lack of benefit from someone from Hurricane Katrina receives from US aid - does that person have something to say about big foundations and how they spend their money?
Use your heart and head when giving
There’s a trend in philanthropy to treat the act of giving as an “investment decision”. This is partly because non-profit management is taught increasingly in business schools, and partly because more wealthy donors with a business background are are becoming involved.
Donors are younger, more active and may have made their money in finance. They believe, as I did until a couple of years ago, that there is a holy grail of metrics, and if we just worked harder to find it, we could measure all non-profits, lay them side by side and figure out which ones were more effective in doing good in the world. EDITOR’S CHOICE Charities take their cue from business - Mar-01 Internet auctions become star attractions - Feb-16 The donor landscape of 2033 is bright - Mar-01 A champion for the persecuted - Mar-08 High-flying individuals on a different path - Mar-15 The age of cyberspace offers aids for giving - Feb-12
What gets lost in all of this focus on evaluation and numbers is the grace and joy of philanthropy. Philanthropy inspires. It tells stories. It reconnects us with others and reminds us of our shared humanity.
Two years ago, I visited a local homeless shelter located between the train tracks and the bus depot. It provided homeless people with free breakfast, a place to hang out and referrals.
I asked the director, a Unitarian minister, how he measured effectiveness. I had expected him to say something about the number of people he had helped find jobs, or the number of breakfast sandwiches it handed out, etc. Instead, he replied simply: “Last year one of our [homeless] regulars died. We paid for his coffin and his burial. And 10 people, who he’d gotten to know here, showed up for his funeral.” He paused. “Does that answer your question?”
That sobering encounter made me think hard. The fact that the non-profit provided a place where a homeless person made friends who cared enough to go to his funeral – something that would not fit into anyone’s investment metrics – speaks volumes about how this non-profit made an impact on this person’s quality of life. The organisation did something incredibly decent for this homeless person at his death. It pulled at my conscience and my heart.
I shouldn’t be so surprised by this story’s effect on me. After all, recent research on philanthropy points to the fact that it is a highly emotional and social behaviour. The work of Deborah Small, a professor of marketing at Wharton business school, shows that presenting potential donors with metrics suppresses donations because it lowers empathy. It is empathy, her research says, that triggers giving.
This rings true intuitively – we’ve all pulled out our cheque books at some point at the sight of the picture of the child in India with a cleft palate.
That’s not to say that effectiveness does not matter and we should look only to our hearts. It matters a great deal, but the human dimension is just as important. Many non-profits are trying to make a difference in people’s lives. And that’s hard to do. People are not products. We are complicated – changing our attitudes, ideas and behaviours can take years and it’s difficult to isolate which single factor contributed to any specific result.
And so, when people ask, “how do I know whether this is a good non-profit?”, I respond as follows: “Go and visit. See for yourself. Volunteer for a soup kitchen and sit down next to an ex-felon. Ask them about their lives. What got them into trouble? How are they coping out of jail? How is this soup kitchen helping?” You will be amazed by the stories. It’s eye-opening, vivid and inspirational.
The other advantage of this first-hand approach is that you’ll see that the work of the non-profits extends beyond tangible, immediate or predictable results. Many such organisations – even those that provide direct services – also work to educate, change attitudes and affect policy. These efforts towards systemic change – think about the various efforts by environmental non-profits in the past 30 years – have a long pay-off timeline and only years later do we see the results of their efforts.
Philanthropy is all the more powerful because of these poignant stories. Let’s not rob such giving of its human pulse by regarding it only as an investment decision.
Bono, of the rock group U2, was inspired to become a philanthropist after travelling to Africa. “I saw it. I heard it. I felt it,” he said.
This is the gift of philanthropy. It will awaken you to the joys, sorrows and above all, the hopes of life and our world.
Fierce Debate on Merits of Strategic Philanthropy
A fiery debate took place at the recent Grantmakers For Effective Organizations conference in San Francisco between Bill Schambra, director of the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, and Paul Brest, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Ed Skloot, former president of the Surdna Foundation, was the moderator, but as Schambra and Brest volleyed responses back and forth, Skloot joked that he was really just “roadkill.”
Bill Schambra dismissed the notion that foundations should be driven by strategic philanthropy and its central premise of having a theory of change, upon which results are measured.
“It is wildly unrealistic to postulate a theory of change and expect anything like its typically complex, fragile chains of cause and effect to play out in real life,” he said.
Schambra noted that conservative foundations – Bradley, Olin, Scaife, and several others – are often held up as examples of strategic philanthropy. “That’s absurd,” he remarked. “These foundations merely capitalized on the political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. To be sure, here and there and at particularly critical moments, the conservative intellectual apparatus contributed a key study or funded an important legal case or held a useful conference. But the foundations mostly stood back and watched for opportunities presented by events driven by others, rather than trying to force circumstances by detailed strategic planning.”
“What foundations can do, I would suggest, is be serious, quiet, attentive students of their surroundings, watching carefully for opportunities to enhance slightly the trends that they applaud, and diminish slightly the trends that they deplore.”
On the other hand, Paul Brest argued that foundations can no longer navigate by sheer “intuition.” As in the fields of medicine and business, they need to become data driven. “It’s not rocket science, but foundations need a clear view of what they want to accomplish and measure if they are getting there,” he said.
Schambra responded, “What’s the point of everyone measuring if there’s no accepted measurement? Then we’d have hundreds of different ways of measuring, and it would be chaos and an insupportable burden to grantees.”
One of the attendees, Gregg Behr, president of the Grable Foundation, noted that most foundations probably walk a balance between the two opposites presented by Brest and Schambra. Foundations could be strategic on one hand with some types of grantmaking, and then when opportunities arise, be nimble enough to take advantage of opportunities. He gave the example of the decision of the Grable Foundation to pull funding from the public school system in Pittsburgh, PA. Grable Foundation had a strategy for improving public education and yet was flexible enough that when they saw the opportunity to team up with other foundations and take a dramatic step to call attention to the issue, they did.
This conference marked the 10th anniversary of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. The conference was attended by a sell-out crowd of over 600 grantmakers, nonprofits, and consultants.
The Public’s Low Confidence in Nonprofits
Trust is at the core of all human relationships and behaviors. To use a borrowed metaphor of the tree, trust is the root. Even though it's underground and not even visible most of the time, it is vital to the strength, stability and growth of the tree. Who have you ever helped that you don't trust? Now consider this question: What if people who are in a position to help your nonprofit don't trust it?
Public attitudes toward nonprofits are sharply negative and distrustful according to a 2005 NYU study:
15 percent said that they had a “great deal of confidence” in charitable organizations.
29 percent said charitable organizations do a very good job helping people.
19 percent said charitable organizations do a very good job running their programs and services.
16 percent said charitable organizations do a very good job at being fair in their decisions
66 percent of Americans said charitable organizations waste a great deal or fair amount of money
46 percent said the leaders of charitable organizations are paid too much.
The NYU study concluded, “these results place charitable organizations far down the list of civic and governmental institutions in overall public confidence.” Using the Gallup percentages as a marker, charitable organizations rank below the military, church, police, banks and public schools. Nonprofits rank just above television news in the public’s confidence.
This is what nonprofits are up against when they send out appeals for donors or volunteers:
Consumer Generated Ratings and Reviews are Trusted and Help Decision Making
Wow, I was stunned by how effective user generated reviews and ratings in influencing decisions. These stats are from the for-profit world, but gives us insights on behavior and expectations of the public:
71% of online shoppers read reviews, making it the most widely read consumer-generated content. (Forrester)
77% of online shoppers use reviews and ratings when purchasing (Jupiter Research, August 2006)
In a study of 2,000 shoppers - 92% deemed customer reviews as "extremely" or "very" helpful. (eTailing Group) 63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. (CompUSA & iPerceptions study)
Among first-time buyers on review-equipped sites, 42% said they were the primary factor. (Foresee Results Study, 2006)
86.9% of respondents said they would trust a friend's recommendation over a review by a critic, while 83.8% said they would trust user reviews over a critic. (MarketingSherpa)
When asked to note their most trusted information source, 60% of Canadian online buyers said consumer reviews compared to 31 per cent who said newspapers or magazines.(J.C. Williams Group for Visa and Yahoo Canada)
The Shop.org State of Retailing Online study, conducted by Forrester Research, found only 26% of the 137 top retailers surveyed offered customer ratings and reviews, but 96% of them ranked customer ratings and reviews as an effective or very effective tactic at driving conversion. (Forrester)
43% of retailers have reviews - double in one year (Marketing Sherpa, February 2007)
Ratings and Reviews is the second most important site feature behind search and online buyers who site ratings and reviews most useful site feature has more than doubled from '05 to '06. The report, entitled Retail Marketing: Driving Sales Through Consumer-Created Content, cites user-generated ratings and reviews as the second most important site feature behind search, and says that retailers who adopt ratings and reviews as a differentiator and retention strategy will gain market share. (Jupiter)
Deborah Small Interview
Latest research on giving behavior - Why vivid, storytelling appeals inspire giving
I had read of Wharton marketing professor Deborah Small's pathbreaking research on how statistics can suppresses giving. I followed up with her by phone with this interview about how nonprofits can use her research to more effectively fundraise…
Q: There are so many nonprofits trying to figure out how to fundraise better. Your research on appealing to emotion is path-breaking…Can you elaborate on how people can appeal to emotion? I know you use the example of one child and you say it should be a "vivid" story. Can you elaborate on that?
A: The more vivid the story – through narrative or through imagery – the more emotionally arousing. And emotions are what triggers the impetus to help. The more surprising finding is that showing statistics can actually blunt this emotional response by causing people to think in a more calculative, albeit uncaring manner.
Q: Are there some people – for whom augmenting these emotional appeals with statistics would be useful?
A: We typically look at averages. Certainly, if you have more intellectual and knowledgeable people, they will care more about the statistics, –but most people most of the time respond negatively so an advertisement is not the place for statistics. Put them somewhere on your website; if people want to find it, they will find it But don't put it in standard advertising. There's so much advertising clutter in the world so you need to focus on catching people's attention and moving them to act by triggering emotion.
Q: What are other things that you think would be fruitful for research to explore on whether it has an effect on people's giving?
A: Some of my research shows that sympathy is particularly responsive to changes to someone's condition. A lot of decision making research demonstrates that human beings are insensitive to absolute values and only respond to changes. For instance, when you put your foot in a cold pool on a hot day it feels cold because of the contrast with the outside temperature. However the water does not feel so cold when you have been in the water for a while. In other words, it is the change in temperatures, not the absolute temperature, which feels cold.
I argue that sympathy is also a function of changes, not states. This is why we respond more emotionally upon learning that someone has lost their home than upon learning that someone is homeless. This might help explain why certain conditions trigger greater sympathy than others. A natural disaster or war causes changes, losses actually, in others' welfare, whereas chronic conditions such as ongoing famine do not. . For non-profit fundraising, it is important to frame situations in terms of changes or losses, not states.
Another project of mine looks at how knowing a victim of a particular misfortune increases sympathy for people with that misfortune. Knowing someone with AIDS makes you more likely to give or volunteer to help others with AIDS. This works because people with firsthand experience are prone to sympathize with others who suffer similarly. Viral marketing and word of mouth can leverage such interpersonal relationships and networks connecting victims and their loved ones.
Q: So doesn't the same sad looking kid every year get old sometime?
A: Of course, you need to make it fresh and focus on different kid next year.
Q: How did you get interested in this subject?
A: My background is in decision-making. I study psychological biases that prevent people from making rational decisions. Therefore, I became interested in comparing socially-efficient, and utility-maximizing decisions to how people actually behave. As we discussed, many of the important biases here are driven by emotion, which can distort rationality.
Q: What do you think of social networking web 2.0 tools for giving?
A: Exciting. It is great that the non-profit world is keeping up with the innovations and keeping it fresh for consumers.
Q: Any other advice you have for nonprofits on what they should try to raise money?
A: In addition to leveraging emotion, creating urgency is also an effective strategy. Think about infomercials – "Hurry now! Only 3 left…." Or "Limited time only". Non-profits need to emphasize the urgency of social needs
Your question about how we evaluate
I've gotten a couple of questions from people who have asked me how GreatNonprofits evaluates charities. My answer is that we don't. We are a website that enables people - volunteers, clients, peers - who know specific nonprofits to share their experience about those nonprofits. Much like Amazon book reviews or any other consumer reviews site (Epnions, Zagats, TripAdvisor, Yelp, etc.) You'll see on our site stories of people who have volunteered for nonprofits and stories of people who have received services.
We know how much the help of a nonprofit can mean and also how difficult it is for nonprofits to show that their social impact. I've known nonprofits personally as a client of their services. My parents were poor and we lived five blocks from the train tracks in public housing and countless nonprofits helped us. If you look at photos of me when I was a kid, practically everything I wore came second hand from nonprofits. My cavities got filled for free at a nonprofit community dental clinic.
And that’s why I'm so personally passionate about GreatNonprofits. It is a tool for sharing the stories and reviews of people -- people like me, the victims of Katrina, and hundreds of thousands of others -- who have seen the impact of nonprofits up close, and can speak personally and firsthand about it.
StoryTelling that moves
From CharityFocus.org, run by the very inspirational Nepun Mehta...
Essentially, a story expresses how and why life changes. --Robert McKee
Storytelling That Moves People: Why is persuasion so difficult, and what can you do to truly inspire people? In search of answers to those questions, Harvard Business Review paid a visit to Robert McKee, the world's best-known and most respected screenwriting lecturer. McKee believes that executives can engage listeners on a whole new level if they toss their PowerPoint slides and learn to tell good stories instead. He argues that stories "fulfill a profound human need to grasp the patterns of living -- not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience" This article shares more of his storytelling secrets. [more]
Using Metrics to Evaluate
I get asked a lot about the question of how to evaluate nonprofits. I once believed that there was a holy grail of metrics that if we just worked harder to find, we could measure all nonprofits, lay them side by side and figure out which ones where doing more good in the world.
And then, I visited a homeless shelter. This one had been around for over 10 years, located between the train tracks and the bus depot. It gave homeless people free breakfast, a place to hang out and some housing. I asked the director, a Unitarian minister, how he measures his effectiveness. I had expected him to say something about the number of people he’s helped find jobs, or the number of breakfast sandwiches they hand out, etc. Instead, he replied simply, “Last week one of our (homeless) regulars died. And 10 people, who he’d gotten to know here, showed up for his funeral. That’s how I measure our effectiveness.”
That sobering encounter made me think hard. Many nonprofits are trying to make a difference in people’s lives. People are not products. We are complicated - changing attitudes, ideas and behaviors could take years and it’s hard to isolate which one factor contributed to any specific result. It’s much more complicated than running a business, where it comes down to profits, units sold, or stock price. The fact that the shelter provided a place where a homeless person made friends who cared enough to go to his funeral - that's something that is impossible to quantify, and yet is so precious and speaks volumes about the nonprofit's impact on this person's life.
The challenge of evaluating a nonprofit using metrics, is similar to asking a parent - what kind of metric do you use to evaluate your parenting? Whether your kid eats green vegetables? Whether your kid makes it onto the basketball team? Whether your kid gets into an Ivy League college? It seems intuitive that none of these metrics adequately reflect adequately whether we have been good parents or not. We may look to some of these things, but then we also use our judgement - is the kid happy and well-adjusted? And even then, we may not know for years whether we succeeded as a parent until we see our kids grown up.
Sociologists struggled with the evaluation question in the 1960’s when evaluating government social programs and most gave up on idea that you could feasibly use the scientific method to evaluate nonprofit programs. MRDC does some great evaluations using control groups and random selection, but there’s very very few programs that would qualify for the huge expense and time involved (plus overcome the moral dilemma to assign certain people to control category where they don’t get treatment/the program). Medium sized and small nonprofits could not afford nor be suited for such types of evaluation.
A good balance I think is that suggested by Phil Buchanan over at the Center for Effective Philanthropy - every organization should set and state its goals, strategies and indicators. Indicators, in my opinion, can embrace narrative stories of impact, as well some sensible numerical indicators. Stories are just as valuable - sometimes a lot more so because they are able to capture nuances - in information as metrics. And in terms of galvanizing donors and volunteers, the research consistently show that photos and stories are more powerful than just numbers.
Fundraising ability between large and small nonprofits grows
"Even as many wealthy nonprofit institutions — like museums and universities — are reporting record increases in contributions, other charities, especially those that provide direct services to the poor, are struggling to get donations and keep up with rapidly escalating demands for aid," according to a Chronicle of Philanthropy article today.
How can nonprofits that serve the poor keep up with the demand in a climate of stagnant or decreasing government funding? I think one way is to tell their stories more powerfully - to both government funders and to individual donors. I remember one story published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review about how a small, semi-remote nonprofit in Northern Larimer County, Colorado was able to shift government reorganization of the state's mental health program. The project manager was going to do a presentation using her powerpoint, but the powerpoint didn't get to the meeting on time.
"Erin Hall’s stomach sank as she sat at a roundtable with 40 of Colorado’s most powerful decision makers in a conference room in downtown Denver last summer. Hall, the project manager of a new mental health and substance abuse program in a semi-remote, northern part of the state, in Northern Larimer County, had been invited to present at the statewide mental health summit. In her old-style presentations, this would have been the part where Hall went into lengthy detail showing charts outlining the 12 strategies for uniting 34 different organizations under a common umbrella, called the Community Mental Health and Substance Abuse (MHSA) Partnership. On this day, she simply showed a slide of a successful, 40-something man in a shirt and tie, smiling and holding a pair of glasses, accompanied by the question, “What if Joe’s story had been different?”
Hall then recounted an entirely new Joe story, still no fairy tale, but one where Joe received proper, coordinated treatment over the course of his life for what he learned was his bipolar disorder. “He has had no jail time, has used remarkably less primary care, the police and ambulance don’t even know who he is, and he has never again been close to suicide,” explained Hall. “The first Joe is reality, the second Joe is the changed reality that we’re working on. Our partnership really believes that things can look different for the Joes of the world.”
The slide show ended, the lights went on, and just like a scene out a heart-tugging movie, the 40 listeners jumped up from their chairs and, for the first time all day, broke into thunderous applause. “Holy cow! They really liked it and it touched them,” Hall remembers thinking at the time. The rest of the day, the entire group talked about Joe, bringing him into the context of every program they address. “How would this affect Joe?” they would ask. Since the summit, word of the Joe story and Northern Larimer County’s ongoing massive revamping of its mental health and substance abuse program continues to spread far beyond the county. The MHSA Partnership is being used as a model for a statewide group trying to help other counties implement similar systemic changes."
Right now, nonprofits that serve the poor need to harness their stories like these and distribute them to their stakeholders - volunteers, donors and government funders. There are so many magical stories of lives changed as a result of nonprofits - it gives me hope that spread widely, these stories can help even the smallest human services nonprofit to find more supporters.
Obligatory pitch to general media
We sent out the following press release today to about 130 media contacts which, according to our database, are interested in nonprofits. This media list includes journalists at Newsweek to those at local newspapers. The benefit to GreatNonprofits aside, I'm curious to see how many responses we get from these journalists. It's an interesting experiment because one of the reasons why we created GreatNonprofits is the absence of serious media coverage about the nonprofit sector and local nonprofits by the general media. The general media coverage nonprofits and giving is usually in the context of
a)some big scandal b)celebrity endorsement of nonprofit (any story with Angela Jolie in it) c)super-rich giving - those Richard Bransons of the world
We were lucky that last year, that Jane Bryant Quinn of NewsWeek was interested in nonprofit evaluation and wrote about us in her article about how to find good nonprofits to give to. It'll be interesting to see who picks up on this story this year. I'll report back to you on that. Here's the press release we sent:
First "Zagats-like" Guide to Nonprofits Launches New site with consumer reviews about nonprofits to help people find worthy nonprofits.
(Dec 10)San Francisco, CA- This season, donors who are looking for worthy nonprofits to give to or volunteer for have a new site where they can check out reviews of the nonprofits by people who have had a direct experience with it.
The site, http://www.greatnonprofits.org, harnesses the Internet's ability to aggregate user-generated content and follows the model of restaurant, movie and product reviews made popular by Zagats, Amazon and Epinions.
"People interested in giving or volunteering can now read reviews of nonprofits submitted by real people who have seen first hand the results. This will help people make giving or volunteering decisions," says Perla Ni, CEO of GreatNonprofits. "It is a bold step forward for philanthropy."
Users on the site can browse hundreds of profiles and reviews of nonprofits and write their own reviews of nonprofits they have interacted with.
"The consumer review sites have helped tens of millions of shoppers make better buying decisions. Informed consumers shop more in aggregate," says Naval Ravikant, GreatNonprofits advisory board member and founder of Epinions.com. "Similarly, GreatNonprofits, by giving authentic, unbiased reviews will create greater trust and faith in charities, and increase the level of giving overall."
At Greatnonprofits.org, donors can read personal stories, see photos, and videos showing how people have volunteered with, worked with, donated to, or benefited from the work of nonprofits.
Pittsburgh is the first city to participate in the pilot. Through the Greater Pittsburgh Nonprofit Partnership, over 300 nonprofits are participating. Reviews of nonprofits have been written by people who have volunteered, who have donated or who have benefited from a nonprofit's services.
Says Vivien Luk of The Forbes Funds, "We see GreatNonprofits as a way to connect the public with services provided by our local nonprofits and to better connect nonprofits with each other. This is also a great way to increase donations and volunteerism for our local nonprofits.
Ni says that GreatNonprofits complements other sites where people go to research nonprofits, such as Guidestar. "GreatNonprofits provides people with subjective, personal reviews– it's a complement to sites which publish data about nonprofits."
For Further Information: Perla Ni, CEO, GreatNonprofits.org perlani(at)greatnonprofits.org
Chronicle of Philanthropy Profile About Us
We thank Sam Kean for profiling us. It was great to talk to the Chronicle and share what we've been doing. I met Stacy Palmer this past summer at the Indiana Philanthropy Conference and we were on the same panel. We held off having them write about us until we officially launched. It is nice to be still considered a "young" leader in philanthropy, as they titled the section, despite the fact that I'm 34 and have 2 kids! I'm officially old here in Silicon Valley 
Here's the article:
A Zagat's for Charities A new online venue allows charity clients, volunteers, and others to post guidebook-style 'reviews'
By Sam Kean
When people ask Perla Ni how her new Web site, Great Nonprofits, helps people judge the quality of charities, Ms. Ni turns the question around on them. "When's the last time you bought a book from Amazon and didn't read the customer reviews?'" she asks. "This site provides that: peer reviews, from honest people, about whether [the charities] are making an impact."
On her Web site, people who receive help from a charity or who volunteer for one can log on and rate their experience on a scale of one to five stars. People can also add comments: praise, suggestions, or criticism about what the charity does well or needs to improve. And if reviewers can't think of what to say, the site offers fill-in-the-blank prompts like, "If this organization had 10-million bucks it could ____ ."
Ms. Ni, the site's founder and chief executive, likens the site to a Zagat restaurant guide, something to help the public decide if a charity is worth donating to or asking for help, just as Zagat helps determine if an Italian restaurant is worth driving across town for. And like the Zagat guides, Great Nonprofits tailors its services to each city. After months of testing, sites for Pittsburgh and San Francisco have opened in the past few weeks, and Ms. Ni expects to expand to other cities soon.
Volunteers' Views
Beyond its possible benefits to the public, the site offers services for charities, too, like feedback on their operations. The Human Services Center Corporation, which coordinates social-service agencies in and around Pittsburgh, has received 42 of the 300-plus total reviews so far, more than any other group. The feedback, which came mostly from volunteers that the center asked to contribute, has pleased David A. Coplan, executive director of the center, and he hopes to take advantage of the positive comments: "We think this will generate additional volunteers for the work we're doing."
However, the site's unrelenting positivity has worried critics. In theory, it bypasses the filter of nonprofit groups, relying instead on the testimony of people affected by charities. But volunteer opinions are not always neutral. Although supportive of the site, Peter Frumkin, a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, worries that it represents "a Lake Wobegon version of philanthropy," he says, "where every charity gets four stars."
In addition to feedback, Great Nonprofits, which raises most of its $180,000 annual budget from individuals and foundations, provides groups with a low-cost way to put up a relatively sophisticated Web site, including pictures and videos. Mr. Coplan's group has just seven full-time employees and no dedicated technology staff members. But Great Nonprofits "provides a vehicle for a lot of organizations who might not have these capabilities," Mr. Coplan says.
The site also lets charities post classified ads and highlights news stories about small organizations — an important service, Ms. Ni says, to remind people of the positive work most local groups do. Given all the functions available, Ms. Ni eventually hopes each city's site will be an omnibus guide for its small nonprofit groups.
Finding Successes
The idea for Great Nonprofits sprang after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. At the time, Ms. Ni was publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, a journal about nonprofit ideas and trends. The editors wanted to know which local charities had done good relief work. But despite being insiders in the nonprofit world, they had a difficult time figuring that out.
So they flew David Weir, then the managing editor, to Biloxi, Miss., to walk the streets and talk to victims. Only then, with comments from local residents about people's experiences, could the Stanford journal's staff members sort out which groups were succeeding and why.
Ms. Ni realized many cities would benefit if people knew more information about local groups, and she knew there was a market for it. As publisher of the Review, she received innumerable pitches on how to evaluate charities, she says, "because that's a question at the heart of every donor: How can I trust you with my money and my time?"
Some evaluation efforts already exist, of course. But most rely on statistics, usually financial data, taken from the Form 990 tax form that organizations file with the Internal Revenue Service. And those data rarely provide a full picture of a charity, says Mr. Frumkin, the Texas professor. Great Nonprofits, he says, "represents a terrific attempt to deal with the inadequacy of purely financial measures of charities," measures he calls "absurdly narrow."
At first Ms. Ni planned to focus on the San Francisco area, where she lives. But the president of the Forbes Funds approached her after a presentation in the spring of 2006 and pitched her on the idea of including Pittsburgh in her testing phase, since he felt the cities' nonprofit scenes were alike.
Both cities have many charities, but few with a national reach, says Vivien Y. Luk, a top official at the Forbes Funds, an organization that helps charities improve their management. Most of those charities focus on small-scale projects that receive little attention. Donors and volunteers, therefore, need the equivalent of someone walking Biloxi and recording people's comments to tell them how well those charities work.
In addition, without national fund-raising arms, those local charities have minuscule budgets. Ms. Luk also helps run the Greater Pittsburgh Nonprofit Partnership, which put up $30,000 to help Great Nonprofits get started, including subsidies for the small fee charities pay to participate. Ms. Luk says nearly three-quarters of the partnership's 300-odd members operate on less than $500,000 annually. That leaves little money for promotion or recruitment. So, just as MySpace lets regular Joes and Janes run their own sites, Ms. Ni wanted to give small charities the chance to get their messages out and distinguish themselves from dozens of similar-sounding groups.
Laptop Computers
One of the first groups to receive feedback when Great Nonprofits began testing last summer was the social-services agency SF Connect. Dariush S. Kayhan, its executive director, says he has been impressed with the 20 testimonials about his group so far.
In June, SF Connect sponsored an event where homeless people could visit doctors and dentists to get free treatment for lingering problems, like lice or cavities. To gauge how well the event worked, Great Nonprofits employees showed up with laptop computers and posted reactions and suggestions from a dozen homeless people after they received treatment.
One man suggested SF Connect could draw more people by holding the event elsewhere, because he felt people were scared to travel to the neighborhood where it was held. Others wanted clearer directions about where medical tents or clothing booths were located. Over all, the comments suggested it was a successful outing.
Great Nonprofits has tried to reach other charity recipients in similar ways, but has struggled. After officials of Great Nonprofits showed up at an event in Pittsburgh to honor people who volunteered as mentors to children, employees had trouble finding an Internet connection, then had difficulty persuading participants to visit their table. The site ended up with few comments. And even when everything works smoothly, Ms. Ni says, sending people to events is labor-intensive and a strain on her staff of five people.
'Definitely a Worry'
Most of the reviews the site has posted so far have been positive — a relief to people like Mr. Kayhan, who had worried about negative responses. When he first heard the site would allow anyone to comment on a nonprofit group's work, he remembers thinking, "Oh, gosh. On the Internet, there's all that run-amok-type stuff."
Indeed, Ms. Luk, of the Pittsburgh partnership, says negative reviews are "definitely a worry that each organization has brought up." Someone involved with local nonprofit groups moderates the site for flagrant or irrelevant postings, but as with most online forums, no one edits comments before they get posted. However, Ms. Luk points out an upside to a few barbed comments. No organization is perfect, she says, and "a negative review actually gives an organization more credibility, because it means you have honest criticism on your site."
In fact, if anything detracts from the usefulness of the site so far, it is the surfeit of positive reviews. The Human Services Center in Pittsburgh — which e-mailed former volunteers and interns to post reviews — has received no rating lower than four stars (and just three of those) amid dozens of perfect scores. Great Nonprofits does try to solicit some constructive criticism with feedback prompts like, "Ways to make it better." But so far, even the very lowest-ranked charities on the site still earned three stars each.
Among all those glittering reviews, it becomes difficult to distinguish which groups work. Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, a watchdog group, notes that even the site's name betrays a bias toward positivity. "I'd be just as interested in a site called Awful Nonprofits," he says. He adds that he wants to see more emphasis on whistle-blowing, "but nonprofits aren't going to want to be listed if they feel there are going to be serious criticisms against them."
Still, Ms. Ni says the open-ended feedback should provide a supplement to other rating systems for now. And as word about the site spreads through Internet ads, direct-mail campaigns, and word of mouth, more lukewarm and possibly even severe reviews should help sift out good groups from less-effective ones.
"This is going to be a long process," she says. "It takes time to build people's awareness of this, especially in the nonprofit sector, where you're serving people that are hard to reach."
A fantastic launch LIVE on WQED!
The launch on WQED was so much fun! We were on live television from 8-9pm on Thursday with about 40 audience members and a substantial amount of home viewers. The staff of WQED was a blast to work with, including Chris Moore, Tonia Caruso, Michael Bartley, and producer Alicia Schisler. Every crew member was as incredibly helpful and energetic as they come and deserves a big applause from everyone. Executive producer Jocelyn Hough and VP of productions Darryl Ford-Williams were also instrumental in putting this idea into play.
We had amazingly great questions from both the audience member as well as callers. One woman called in to see where she can go to donate wigs for cancer victims and another asked us how we may gather the community to collectively go deep and find root causes for some of our social issues. It is great to see folks catching on to the idea of the Site and find ways to really be involved with it.
I think our 3 panelists - Diana Bucco of The Forbes Funds, Fay Morgan of North Hills Community Outreach, and Richard Reed of The Pittsburgh Foundation - did a tremendous job of connecting ways to give and volunteer to the Site, allowing the viewers to understand it to be a resource to them as well as to our nonprofit sector. To top this off, Perla called in towards the end of show so that our community was able to hear from her thoughts on this Site. Pittsburgh is definitely the right region to be the first to launch something as creative and resourceful to the nonprofit sector as Great Nonprofits and I'm grateful that it's a project we were able to take on.
A BIG dose of gratitude goes out to our region's nonprofit sector, WQED, members of the GPNP, and all who were involved with the big launch here in Pittsburgh!!
Here's the archived webcast: http://www.wqed.org/tv/pm/specials/ornr.shtml
Hear GreatNonprofits on local NPR
Here's the radio segment about GreatNonprofits in case you missed it live on the local NPR station WDUQ: http://wduq.org/news/newsaudio2.html
Larkin Page-Jacobs did a very thorough piece and interviewed Gregg Behr, Vivien Luk, Faye Morgan and me (Perla). My voice is a bit out of breath as I am in my last two weeks of pregnancy and I have barely any space to breathe.
Pittsburgh to Launch TODAY!!
What an exciting day for the Pittsburgh nonprofit sector and Great Nonprofits! Today marks the official launch of the Great Nonprofits web site. We have been working hard here at the Greater Pittsburgh Nonprofit Partnership to get this Site ready for the community, so it's an incredible feeling to finally be able to officially go LIVE with it. Tonight, at 8pm, we will broadcast live from the WQED studio. Three panelists, Diana Bucco of The Forbes Funds, Richard Reed of The Pittsburgh Foundation, and Fay Morgan of North Hills Community Outreach will join us to discuss the Site and we look forward to having viewers call in with thoughts and questions! I will also join them on screen to navigate through the Site to share all of the golden nuggets.
We welcome your feedback as we continue to make adjustments so that this can be the most useful site for everyone who either works in the nonprofit sector or would like to be involved with a nonprofit. So let us know what you think!
Cheers, Vivien
GreatNonprofits on Radio and TV
Pittsburgh is going to become the first city in the country to launch a "Zagat's" guide to local nonprofits tomorrow! It's a breath-taking bold step for the nonprofits - nearly 300 of them who are part of the Greater Pittsburgh Nonprofit Partnership - in this community.
We'll be featured on the local NPR station, DUQ (FM 90.5) TWICE! Once at 6:35am and then at 8:35am this Thursday, Nov. 8th.
Also, watch us on TV LIVE unveiling the site and discussing it's impact on the Pittsburgh nonprofit community. On WQED at 8pm, Thursday Nov. 8th.
Welcome to the GreatNonprofits Blog
I'm thrilled and excited to share with you the official launch of GreatNonprofits!
We have been inspired by all the terrific nonprofits who have participated in the pilot. They've pushed our thinking, reality-tested our assumptions, and contributed a lot of time to road-testing this website. A big hug and thank you for your patience and feedback! We couldn't have done this without our nonprofit partners. The Greater Pittsburgh Nonprofit Partnership, most notably, had the courage to step forward and volunteer Pittsburgh, PA to be the first to pilot this in the country. You guys are awesome - and I am a Pittsburgh evangelist now for life!
Take a look around and we'd love to hear your feedback. Feel free to email me and tell me what else we can do to make this website more useful to you!
Best, Perla
GreatNonprofits Day Out - collecting feedback from the homeless in San Francisco
What an incredible day! SFConnect invited us to go with them to HuntersPoint/BayView to collect feedback on their services from homeless people that they serve and their volunteers. We brought 20 laptops (generously loaned to us by friends at McKinsey & Co, SterlingStamos, California Community Tech Foundation and Computer Recycling Center), our own electricity generator, server and wireless router. Great friends - Lloyd Niemetz, founder of HelpArgentina now Stanford MBA student, Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy, and Maryann Fernandez of Shaking the Tree - volunteered to collect feedback from the homeless. The excellent interns at YouthNoise came out with documentary film pro Allister Williams and made short video interviews with the homeless. You can watch them here
It was an eye-opening experience for us. There in the middle of the warehouse district of San Francisco, was what almost seemed like a huge music festival. SFConnect had provided a local band that was stirring up the beat and a hot lunch, in addition to tables upon tables of volunteers ready to sign up homeless people for services or to give them services on the spot. We talked to one homeless person who was ecstatic that he was able to get his cavities filled by dentists on the spot. Another who got a haircut. You can read these reviews by the homeless here yourself.
We were all struck by how much the homeless enjoyed being asked about their opinion. It made me wonder how common, we as a nonprofit sector who talk so much about "empowering" the people we serve, is it that we ask the people that we serve for their opinion on how we are serving them.
We also certainly learned a lot about the challenges of collecting feedback from clients when they are, as in this case, mostly very low-income, not educated and not online. It takes effort to collect feedback from such a population.
Yet what I take away from this experience the most deeply is how much we enjoyed talking to these homeless folks. Sean and Maryann emailed me to thank them for giving them the opportunity to do intake - before I could email my thank-yous to them. I think it was such a rewarding experience for all of us because we connected with people who we usually think of as different, or separate from us. And we realized that they really weren't that different than you or I - and we felt that common bond of humanity. Days like this - out in the sun, in the blistery summer San Francisco wind, in the middle of a parking lot with hundreds of volunteers and homeless people and talking with them and laughing at their jokes - are so incredibly alive and vivid. My days in the office in front of my computer are bland and pale by comparison.
Take a look for yourself at who we talked to and what they said and let me know what you think!
NewsWeek gives heads up on GreatNonprofits
Thanks to Bill Meehan, on our advisory board, for connecting us with Jane Bryant Quinn of NewsWeek who was writing her annual column on Giving. Jane is quite a thorough journalist and asked us some tough questions. Naval Ravikant, also on our advisory board and founder of Epinions, helped us answer some of her questions on the collective wisdom of the crowds. Her article mentioning us as the future of transparency for nonprofits is here.
