This is my most recent column in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. You can find an archive of my past columns here. More Than Money, a Lack of Research Hampers Nonprofit Innovation By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Chronicle of Philanthropy The federal government will soon release guidelines to spell out how it will award $50-million through its [...]
Category Archives: Evaluation
The Overhead Question: The Future of Nonprofit Assessment and Reporting
February 3, 2010 – 2:28 pm
Tomorrow at 11am pacific time, I’ll be moderating a conference call sponsored by NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network. The details are below, the call is free and over 200 people are already registered. I hope you’ll join us! NTEN Press Release: In response to feedback from the sector and from the public, GuideStar, Charity Navigator, [...]
BusinessWeek on Effective Philanthropy
January 14, 2010 – 12:16 pm
The Current edition of BusinessWeek includes a story on effective philanthropy that highlights Tactical Philanthropy Advisors and many of the charity evaluation groups that I write about regularly. Rethinking Ways to Give Wisely By Amy Feldman …At least a half-dozen groups have come up with different answers to the question of how to help donors [...]
The Future of Charity Evaluation
December 2, 2009 – 7:46 am
The “newsworthy” element of the anti-overhead ratio press release yesterday was the involvement of Charity Navigator. The group has 3 million users, is regularly pointed to by the mainstream media and studies show that their ratings affect donor behavior. The fact that they are transforming their system, a system that they’ve successfully built their organization [...]
The Worst (and Best) Way to Pick a Charity
December 1, 2009 – 9:59 am
Today is a very important moment for the charity evaluation movement. For years, I and many others have complained that Charity Navigator’s focus on overhead expense ratios in evaluating nonprofits was counter productive. Then in 2008, Charity Navigator hired a new CEO. At the time I called for a “cease fire” in criticisms of Charity [...]
Philanthropedia Sources Expert Knowledge
November 17, 2009 – 8:08 pm
This is a guest post by Erinn Andrews, COO of Philanthropedia, which I blogged about in October. You can find my write up on their efforts here. Providing donors with better information—actionable and scalable—all in one place By Erinn Andrews Clearly, people care. If we look at charitable contributions in 2008, we see that individuals [...]
Philanthropedia
October 9, 2009 – 9:17 am
For some time now I’ve been pushing the idea that facilitating a way for philanthropy and social cause experts to share their knowledge with individual donors is the big opportunity in philanthropy. The Tactical Philanthropy Knowledge Network is our effort to tackle this problem. Another effort is under way by a group called Philanthropedia. Philanthropedia [...]
Reframing Philanthropy: A Bullet Point Manifesto
October 7, 2009 – 8:32 am
George Overholser of NFF Capital Partners (a division of the Nonprofit Finance Fund) is one of the smartest people in philanthropy. He is one of the leading advocates for growth capital and is my mentor when it comes to the importance of philanthropic equity. He has written many a 25 page paper on these ideas, [...]
Accepting Discomfort as We Navigate Uncertainty
September 14, 2009 – 8:04 am
Last month I was invited to a brainstorming session hosted by IDEO. The focus was on Innovation in Evaluation and one of the outputs is a blog authored by IDEO and hosted by GOOD magazine. The brainstorming session concluded with the identification of a number of core concepts that we discussed and a promise from [...]
IDEO & Philanthropy
August 13, 2009 – 9:09 am
Some time last year I started reading about the company IDEO. IDEO is one of the leading design firms globally (they designed the modern computer mouse!), but from my standpoint, it is their pioneering work in “design thinking” that caught my attention and got me thinking about the applications of their approach in philanthropy. I [...]
