This is a guest post from Hope Neighbor, founder of Hope Consulting which recently released the report Money For Good. Read Part I. Read Part III. By Hope Neighbor Greg wrapped up yesterday’s post with the assertion that we should work with donor behaviors before we work against them. That’s easy to say, but harder [...]
Category Archives: Effective Giving
Money For Good: Helping Donors Give More Effectively
July 1, 2010 – 7:52 am
This is a guest post from Greg Ulrich, project lead on the Money For Good report from Hope Consulting. Read Part II. Read Part III. By Greg Ulrich There’s been some terrific discussion here on Tactical Philanthropy in recent weeks about the results of our Money for Good study. Sean and others have been particularly [...]
Getting Results: Outputs, Outcomes & Impact
June 29, 2010 – 7:43 am
Professional philanthropy, like all professions, has built a special language to describe its work. This sort of language can be used to more precisely discuss issues of importance to a field or it can be jargon that obscures meaning and serves to identify professionals to each other while excluding “outsiders”. Most donors, regardless of [...]
Chasing Philanthropic Opportunities
June 18, 2010 – 8:36 am
The general framework of how money flows in the nonprofit sector is focused on the assumption that nonprofits need to chase donations. This is also how the business sector works; companies chase revenue. But investing is different. Investors often are the ones chasing the best investment opportunities. It is simply an issue of supply and [...]
Building an Effective Philanthropy for Real Donors
June 14, 2010 – 9:14 am
Underlying much of the recent discussion about whether donors care whether nonprofits are effective and how to build a more effective field of philanthropy, is a recurring focus on how philanthropy experts think donors should behave. I thought the New Philanthropy Capital blog captured the silliness of this approach most aptly in their recent post [...]
Tim Ogden on Whether Donors Care
June 10, 2010 – 10:53 am
Tim Ogden of Philanthropy Action weighs in on the recent debate: “Jacob has already pointed to the Hope Consulting study that Hewlett partly-funded. I encourage everyone to read it (it’s available at www.hopeconsulting.us) because it offers another important piece of the puzzle in this regard (note that, like Jacob, I have a connection to Hope [...]
All Donors Care About Impact
June 10, 2010 – 8:57 am
In my post on Tuesday, I discussed a study that seemed to suggest that donors are not interested in information about whether nonprofits are any good at what they do. My conclusion was that donors are interested in this sort of information, but only if it is presented in an engaging way. In other words, [...]
Do Donors Care Whether Nonprofits Are Any Good?
June 8, 2010 – 8:30 am
Early this month, the British research and consulting firm YouGov released the results of a study on whether donors are interested in charity ratings.The report was headlined, ““Mixed response towards grading system for charities.” UK based New Philanthropy Capital, a nonprofit rating and philanthropy consulting organization, reflected on the results in a recent blog post: [...]
Performance Vs. Impact Debate Rekindled
June 7, 2010 – 9:10 am
Last summer, an epic debate took place on this blog as a number of readers and social sector leaders argued about whether donors should focus on supporting “high performing” or “high impact” nonprofits (see links here, here, here and here). The basic difference is that a high performing nonprofit is an organization that is run [...]
Follow Up On Mirror Neurons & Empathy
May 13, 2010 – 8:25 am
Yesterday I shared a video about the role of empathy in human civilization. One of the push backs that people always have when I get all soft and touchy-feely and start talking about emotions and empathy, is that philanthropy requires more rigor than an empathetic, emotional approach (supposedly) allows. So I want to point to [...]
