 | David Bonbright Director, accountability organization Keystone [1] | |||
 IT IS EASY TO SAY that charities should account for what they do - ever more so as the Internet becomes the “public reporting” mechanism of choice.Independent bodies analyzing charities may well create important changes in charity performance. But will these independent analysts drive charities in the right directions? The answer, so far, has to be no. “They can fail them all for poor reporting even though they may well be doing good work”Since charity raters – including Intelligent Giving – can’t do research on anything that isn’t already publicly available, everything hinges on the information charities publish. Since charities do not, in the main, publish good information, raters face a difficult choice. They can fail them all for poor reporting even though they may well be doing good work. Or they can succumb to the temptation to rate them on the information that they do produce, creating an illusion of meaningful comparison. I leave you to guess which route the raters choose. I do think charities need to be more accountable and to publish better information, but I advocate a different approach: rather than rating on the basis of charities’ information, I am interested in the question of who holds the charities to account. “People with daily experience of the charity are in the best position to judge it”The raters' model assumes that charities should be accountable to donors. But the people charities should be accountable to is their beneficiaries - as well as the other people whose daily experience of the charity means that they can judge its effectiveness. If I am trying to understand how effective a charity is, I am suspicious of what the charity says about itself - and dismissive of what raters conclude from that information. Related articles
The June 2006 Tsunami Evaluation Coalition Report highlighted the importance of this kind of accountability when it concluded that charities were “most effective when enabling, facilitating and supporting” people on the ground, and being accountable to them. So my challenge to raters is to build a model that prioritises accountability to those people who are most affected by the charities’ work. Accountability to donors should be secondary. If this model were built, it would be a major breakthrough and could box some major charity brands onto the ropes. |