This is a guest post by Holden Karnofsky, the co-Executive Director of GiveWell. GiveWell finds outstanding charities to help donors decide where to give. By Holden Karnofsky Imagine that, as a donor, you’re considering the following pitch: “For 12 years our campaign has delivered a proven preventive health measure. For the $23 million we’ve spent [...]
Category Archives: Impact Measurement
Repurposing Volunteer Work to Gather Data
September 23, 2011 – 6:00 am
This is a guest post by David Bonbright, co-founder and chief executive of Keystone Accountability. By David Bonbright When we study the existing approaches and tools used to understand the results of organizations that seek to create social value, we can see that something new and exciting is slowly being born. For the first time, [...]
YouthTruth & Beneficiary Feedback
September 21, 2011 – 6:00 am
This is a guest post by Valerie Threlfall, Vice-President of The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s beneficiary feedback YouthTruth initiative. By Valerie Threlfall The power of feedback is almost universally acknowledged. Every day, millions of people turn to reviews written by end-users in Yelp, Trip Advisor, GreatNonprofits, and Global Giving to inform their purchasing and philanthropic [...]
The Decline Effect & “Proven” Nonprofit Interventions
August 24, 2011 – 6:00 am
One of the great buzzwords of the effective philanthropy movement is the idea of “proven effective” programs. Since so many nonprofit programs are never tested and are based on ideas that have little research behind them, it makes sense to encourage the funding and deploying of programs that have proven to be effective. While sensible, [...]
The Value of Charting Impact
June 6, 2011 – 9:13 am
On Friday, Bob Ottenhoff wrote about the new Charting Impact initiative that gets nonprofits to answer five questions as part of a public report that is intended to encourage donations and grants to flow towards effective nonprofits. But can five questions answered with a couple of pages of text really help donors understand which organizations [...]
Charting Impact: Common Impact Reporting
June 3, 2011 – 9:18 am
This is a guest post by Bob Ottenhoff, CEO of Guidestar, which has partnered with BBB Wise Giving Alliance and Independent Sector to launch Charting Impact. There has been a long-standing debate among nonprofits and those that benefit from nonprofits’ goods and services about how to measure nonprofit effectiveness. It seems every organization has a [...]
How Philanthropists Can Jump Start The Impact Investing Industry
May 6, 2011 – 3:27 am
This is a guest post from Colby Dailey. Colby manages the affordable homeownership initiative Cornerstone Partnership for NCB Capital Impact. She has been working in and alongside the philanthropy sector as a grantmaker and practitioner for over ten years. By Colby Dailey I believe that philanthropists’ willingness to pay for social returns positions them to [...]
Valuing the Future: Discount Rates in Philanthropy
February 11, 2011 – 9:28 am
One of the most basic financial tools is the concept of present value. The present value concept simply assumes that value received in the future is worth less than the same value received today. You can see this dynamic working if you think about whether you would rather be given $100 today or be given [...]
