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Adam Rothwell
- Thursday, November 8, 2007
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW how good a charity's work is, then ask someone who has direct experience of it. Don't ask us. All we can tell you is how transparent a charity is, what it actually does and roughly what state its finances are in.
Knowing how well a charity does its job is hard. If you share their analytical approach, you can always ask the researchers at New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) for their opinions. But NPC only reviews about 100 charities. What do you do about the country's remaining 179,900?
Until now, there's been no good answer to that question. But a website launched this week in the US might help change that.
Great Nonprofits is a website designed to let people with direct experience of charities tell the world what they think. Like a book on Amazon, each charity has a page which contains both a description of the work it does and comments on it. Here at last then is a more rounded view of a charity, with comments from those closest to it.
If this works - which means if a critical mass of people use it - then it could provide the definitive insider's resource for discerning givers, and could one day be reproduced over here.
There are some problems. We're worried that charity staff will crowd the site with their own favourable write-ups. Already the unqualified cheeriness of many of the comments makes you wonder. But this is only the same issue that faces Amazon - and hopefully sheer weight of numbers means that, in time, booster bias will be ironed out.
Sites like Great Nonprofits offer a way for donors to side-step the slick, uninformative marketing many big charities press upon us. If it works, it will help us all understand how charities really tick, which in our opinion is an unqualified good thing.
Knowing how well a charity does its job is hard. If you share their analytical approach, you can always ask the researchers at New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) for their opinions. But NPC only reviews about 100 charities. What do you do about the country's remaining 179,900?
Until now, there's been no good answer to that question. But a website launched this week in the US might help change that.
Great Nonprofits is a website designed to let people with direct experience of charities tell the world what they think. Like a book on Amazon, each charity has a page which contains both a description of the work it does and comments on it. Here at last then is a more rounded view of a charity, with comments from those closest to it.
If this works - which means if a critical mass of people use it - then it could provide the definitive insider's resource for discerning givers, and could one day be reproduced over here.
There are some problems. We're worried that charity staff will crowd the site with their own favourable write-ups. Already the unqualified cheeriness of many of the comments makes you wonder. But this is only the same issue that faces Amazon - and hopefully sheer weight of numbers means that, in time, booster bias will be ironed out.
Sites like Great Nonprofits offer a way for donors to side-step the slick, uninformative marketing many big charities press upon us. If it works, it will help us all understand how charities really tick, which in our opinion is an unqualified good thing.
Now we know what you're driving at....
Surely in the case to which you refer people weren't primarily complaining about the personal treatment that they were subjected to but rather the way in which the organisation concerned was being managed. I'd be interested to hear whether you feel that anything that has happened since the last of those postings leads you to believe that the criticism was unwarranted or malicious. Rather than being something to be concerned about I assume that the new website will view this kind of debate as being of value to the sector and in the interests of charity supporters and beneficiaries..... And about time too, perhaps they'll be given some of the Charity Commission's £30m pa.
Don't shoot the messenger
Hmmm, as the C in my username stands for "Cynical" (today anyway) I can't help suspecting that this link and rest of this post will be redundant.
'Observer' if you are not a registered user hiding behind an unverified ID, my apologies - and in case your enquiry is genuine ...
Any customer services expert will tell you that someone who has had a negative experience is likely to tell more people about it than someone who had a good experience. (In the same vein, organisations usually recieve more complaints - in numerical terms - than compliments). If someone with some kind of agenda shouts loud enough, then they are likely to drown everyone else out. This would not necessarily be a true reflection of the reality of the 'service'/experience/whatever.
As IG says - " ... hopefully sheer weight of numbers means that, in time, booster bias will be ironed out." Time will tell.
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... nearly Vlad the Impaler
Hello Ms LMC.
That scenario sounds to me a little unlikely. People may comment about their negative experiences of a charity as an organisation, but they are surely highly unlikely to focus on the way that they were treated personally. I can see nothing wrong with those who are 'in the know' sharing their experiences whether positive or nagative. We are after all (apparently) all engaged in the process of enabling transparency and accountability within the sector.
"There are some problems. We're worried that charity staff will crowd the site with their own favourable write-ups."
Or flood a charity with emotional essays about How They Done Me Wrong to the extent that everyone gets bored and stops responding.
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... nearly Vlad the Impaler
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