GreatNonprofits Widget - Add Reviews To Your Site!
The Great*Guide - 2009 Bay Area Guide to Giving and Volunteering
It rolled off the presses and I got my first copy today. We then were doing a presentation at the Sobrato Center for SV2's grantees and showed them the Guide, and I had nonprofits coming up to me afterwards and asking how they could get into the Guide next year.
The Great*Guide is going to be available shortly online and in print. It'll be distributed through select retailers in the Bay Area and through the Nov 12th issue of the San Francisco Chronicle to select neighborhoods in the Bay Area. Look for it!
Perla
GreatNonprofits On the Road - Cleveland, Philly and San Diego
Come out and see us!
We'll be speaking at
San Diego Grantmakers conference in San Diego Oct 23rd
Ohio Grantmakers conference in Cleveland Oct 29th
Independent Sector conference in Philly, Tuesday Nov 11th
Would love to meet you all in person!
Perla
The Columbus Foundation - a model for communitiy foundations
If you are from Columbus, you know this already. The Columbus Foundation is an outstanding community foundation. Lisa Courtice invited me to speak at their 2008 celebration and I had a chance to see up close the work of this foundation.
First off, I was really impressed by Doug Kridler, President of the Columbus Foundation. With a substantial civic and volunteer background, Doug understands that a one of the most fundamental things that a community foundation does, is to support local nonprofits. He emphasized, to a crowd of nonprofits - "Our effectiveness is your effectiveness." I saw this commitment to local nonprofits in conversations with many of their staff. Their PowerPhilanthropy initiative seeks to provide more information and thus direct more giving to local nonprofits.
The Columbus Foundation does well on the donor side as well. I had the pleasure of meeting one of their donors, Shirle Westwater. She just had her 90th birthday party. She is a devoted donor and past board member of the Columbus Foundation. She's proud of the fact that people know her as the woman who asks people to donate. She's particularly proud of the fact that she got asphalt donated for the parking lot and trees for the courtyard of the beautiful Columbus Foundation campus.
The foundation seems to be loved by many of their donors. In fact they are currently the 9th largest community foundation in terms of assets, and most of those assets are unrestricted grants to the foundation. It's a high sign of trust that their donors give so much directly to the Columbus Foundation.
I spoke in my presentation there about the origin of the word philanthropy - which translates loosely to "love of mankind'. And about the uniquely American tradition of philanthropy with its citizens coming together to form voluntary associations. It is embedded in our history. The first "corporation" in this country, was a nonprofit one - Harvard College. The first civic institutions - fire station, library, city council - were all formed as voluntary associations to which people gave their time and their money. And gave it out of love. Shirle started to tear up when she talked about what philanthropy meant to her. "It's a real joy to give," she said with a big smile. Wow, what a way to continue our country's history of philanthropy and what a great testament to the community nurtured by the Columbus Foundation!
GreatNonprofits in DC
Nonprofits are spreading the word about how "reviews" increases your public visibility and improves your organizational performance.
In September, we were at the Nonprofit Roundtable where we and GuideStar introduced our partnership. We heard testimonials from Interstages, SERVE Inc., and Mary's Center, who have already benefited from being reviewed on GreatNonprofits. Check out their reviews!
Mary's Center - http://www.greatnonprofits.org/reviews/profile2/marys-center-for-maternal-child-care-inc
Interstages - http://www.greatnonprofits.org/reviews/profile2/interstages-inc1
SERVE Inc. - http://greatnonprofits.com/reviews/profile2/serve-inc
We were honored to be able to serve such amazing nonprofits!
The session was at the Urban Institute and attended by both foundations and nonprofits.
Bay Area Giving and Volunteering Guide
I'm thrilled to announce that Bay Area nonprofits who have 3 or more reviews will be considered for inclusion in our first ever Bay Area Giving and Volunteering Guide. Similar to Zagats' Guide, this print publication will include reviews of nonprofits along with short descriptions. Our marketing managers are working hard to get the message out to all Bay Area nonprofits. David Weir, on our advisory board, former managing editor of Mother Jones and Salon, has been helping us conceive of the content. The editorial design firm Exbrook, has taken the lead in helping us bring this to life. Look for it this Oct/Nov to be distributed through local newspapers.
Best,
Perla
Website Improvements
Hey all,
Thank you for all your suggestions for improving our website. We were able to get a lot of your ideas implemented in this new release. Marcel, our intrepid developer completed the release this morning.
You'll see:
*Sort by “most recently reviewed” under Find Reviews
*On the “reviews” page is a prominent call to action for nonprofits to solicit reviews – “Add more reviews – ask volunteers, clients…” This links to the email form.
*Location search for “Find Nonprofits” – you can choose the city from a drop-down.
*For the individual advanced profile, we eliminated the fields: “marital status”, “gender”, “Blog or website”
*“Also Known As” field for nonprofits to add past names or other names they are known as.
*There is a Success message for photo upload
*Nonprofits no longer need to choose a “thumbnail” for the search results display page or the homepage. We are now converting their logos to resize. (It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good).
*For the nonprofit Advanced Profile: fields that are not completed are hidden instead of showing “not yet provided by the nonprofit”.
*The default search option has changed to "and" instead of exact phrase.
Thank you all for all of your helpful suggestions and inquiries. Please keep the good ideas coming. Drop me a line perlani(at)greatnonprofits.org
Best,
Perla
Partnership with GuideStar
I am very excited to tell you about a new partnership between GreatNonprofits and Guidestar that we think will help nonprofits get more visibility and attract more volunteers and supporters.
As a result of our partnership, reviews posted on GreatNonprofits will also be seen on GuideStar.org later this Fall. In addition to this, GuideStar has some tremendous other new developments that will be unveiled in the Fall - watch for it!
This summer, we're working closely together to get the message out. We recently co-hosted the after-hour party at the CompassPoint conference in San Francisco. And GuideStar invited us to co-exhibit at the AMA Nonprofit conference in DC last week. Look for us and GuideStar making the rounds this summer!
New Outreach Managers !
I'm so excited to introduce our new outreach managers. They are smart, articulate, and dedicated to the nonprofit community. Allison, Sarah, Erin, Caroline, Lisa, Amanda, and Kathleen are all Stanford students.
They are being led by our intrepid Shari Ilsen and Sujata Shayam. Sujata was part of the team that did the outreach in Pittsburgh, PA and we're thrilled to have her rejoin us for this launch. More bios and pics of everyone here: http://www.greatnonprofits.org/team
The outreach managers did a week long orientation with activities and speakers such as Bruce Sievers. They visited GoodWill industries and Delancey Street restaurant in San Francisco and volunteered at Glide.
Now, they will be helping nonprofits to collect reviews from their stakeholders. Lisa and Sarah went on their first site visit this week to Peninsula Bridge Program where they collected reviews from Spanish-speaking parents of the kids in the program. Lisa has studied in Chile and Madrid and was able to speak to the parents and translate their stories. See http://www.greatnonprofits.org/user/1380
I'm going to be inviting these stellar outreach managers to post on this site about their experience. Drop Shari a line, if you can use the help of one of our outreach managers to come to you and help you collect reviews from your volunteers, clients or other stakeholders.
Perla
Head or Heart When Appealing to Donors?
There is no doubt that attracting and retaining donors is front of mind for all nonprofits, particularly given the struggles of our current economy. Beyond the traditional methods, some new players in the sector have developed online applications for reaching out to donors. Interestingly, however, these Internet-based approaches can differ quite dramatically in how they woo potential givers. Two organizations in particular come at donors from almost opposite angles: one strikes at the heads of donors, with a more investment advisor approach, using statistics, measurements and hard data; the other strikes at individuals’ hearts, using stories and ratings to intrigue donors. Although both would probably agree that, in reality, donors rely on a mix of the two in making their charitable giving decisions.
Winning their hearts According to Wharton professor Deborah Small, organizations that want to raise money should appeal to the hearts of potential donors, not their heads. The study she conducted, along with co-authors George Loewensteinb and Paul Slovic, shows that when making charitable gifts, “most people probably do not calculate the expected benefit of their donation. Rather, choices are made intuitively, based on spontaneous affective reactions."
Examples cited by the study include, according to the publication Knowledge@Wharton, “several well-known examples of large sums of money being donated to help identifiable victims. In 1987, a child named Jessica McClure, dubbed "Baby Jessica" by the news media, fell into a well near her home in Texas and received nearly $700,000 in donations from the public. Ali Abbas, a boy who lost both his arms and his parents in the Iraq War in 2003, was the subject of widespread media attention in Europe and received some $550,000 in donations. Even animals generate sympathy: In 2002, more than $48,000 was contributed to save Forgea, a dog stranded on a ship adrift in the Pacific Ocean.”
In the Knowledge article, Small suggests that there are important take-aways from the study for charitable organizations. "It's all about putting together a simple, emotionally compelling message. The best way to do that is in the form of a picture or a story, something that purely engages the emotional system. The mistake that many charities make is trying to appeal both to emotion and to reason. They assume this would be more effective than appealing to only one or the other, but it isn't."
GreatNonprofits Perla Ni also believes that donors will respond best to the stirring stories of nonprofits, and founded the organization GreatNonprofits to enable nonprofit stories to be told. Founder and former publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Ni states on her organization’s website, “It struck me, as I struggled professionally to find great nonprofits for our magazine [Stanford Social Innovation Review] to write about, that there needed to be an online "Zagat," if you will, for nonprofits that would collect stories and reviews of people—people like me, the victims of Katrina, and hundreds of thousands of others—who have seen the impact of nonprofits up close, and can speak personally and firsthand about it.”
The mission of the organization is GreatNonprofits is to: • Help inspire and inform prospective donors and volunteers, help them differentiate between nonprofits, find ones that they trust, and be more confident in giving or signing up to volunteer. • Enable great nonprofits, regardless of the size of their marketing budget, to harness their most authentic and most effective advertising - the stories of the people they’ve served. • Promote greater nonprofit excellence through feedback and transparency.
GreatNonprofits uses a model similar to TripAdvisor, Epinions or Yelp that rely on people who have actually interacted with an organization to post reviews and ratings. In the case of GreatNonprofits, these people might be volunteers, board members, staff members or clients of the nonprofits. An example is the reviews of MusicLink Foundation from both clients and volunteers. So far, this charity has a five-star rating based on three reviews. Reviews of other nonprofits are not all positive, as clients who have less than satisfactory interactions are free to post their thoughts as well. Caroline Heine
Inequality in Giving- Interview with Rob Reich, Author of “A Failure of Philanthropy”
Perla: Rob, you've done a lot of research on how very little individual donations here in the U.S. actually go towards causes that serve the needs of the poor. Can you update us on your research on this inequality of giving?
Rob: It's proceeding on two fronts. First, I’m following up on the example I gave in the SSIR article about private giving to public schools in California. I have ten year database about every nonprofit in California that raises money for public schools. I'll be looking at the distribution of private dollars and their consequences.
Perla: I just recently realized that you used to be a teacher. Now it makes sense your interest in public schools.
Rob: Yes. I used to be a sixth grade teacher in Houston. And the second thing - I'm in the midst of writing a book looking at the simple and fundamental question about the role of the state in providing incentives to give money away. Why should the state provide any incentive for donations? I think the answer is not well developed or understood.
Perla: What's the response you get from donors when you present your research?
Rob: I often get a little bit of a surprise. In particular, people don't realize - even though it's quite consistent in the findings - that over half of all charitable dollars from individual donors to religion and faith-based charities that serve the poor, have already been carved out. The media has not done a good job of reporting this. And then with respect to the inequalities in giving, in the audiences that I talk to, there's often some thought that charity does have a role in serving the needs of the poor and disadvantaged. And they are surprised overall how little goes to the needy. My anecdotal experience matches up with the findings that the Google study presented - the intention that people have to give to the poor is widespread but not actualized in practice.
Perla: Why do you think that is?
Rob: The simple answer is that the most important reason people give money away is that they know already to give. Poor people are not asking rich people to give money away.
Perla: What can small and medium sized nonprofits who provide basic services for the poor do?
Rob: They should try to develop a development office. But that's a catch twenty-two- you need donation and overhead to get it off the ground. You can try to appeal to people's best intentions. Show statistics. But it shouldn't be the responsibility of people working in these nonprofits. This is a public policy problem. One of the public policy solutions is to provide a differentiated incentive structure. It makes sense to me to provide additional incentives, or diminish existing incentives for things that don't give to the poor. How to operationalize what that would look like is still unclear. I don't accept that this will politicize the deduction structure. There's already politics involved in defining what is 501C3 and 501C4 so we're not crossing a new threshold. The system makes distinctions between what organizations get tax benefits and which don’t
Perla: What are some things that can be done to raise awareness about this?
Rob: The media could do a better job reporting about it. The kind of high profile, glamour with which the media portray big ticket donations such as refurbishing cultural, medical institutions - I'd like to see similar attention paid to, say, the Robin Hood foundation or other organizations where the intention is to serve needs of the poor. But I don't want to make this a media problem or a nonprofit problem - this is a public policy issue. There are things that nonprofits and media should do, but this is mostly public policy problem.
Perla: Do donors also have some responsibility to be more aware of what they are giving to? I sometimes wonder if donors, because they tend to come from a different socio-economic background than the poor, whether they feel less comfortable being involved or giving to the poor?
Rob: I don't think it's a matter of donor psychology or stereotypes about the poor because there's been vast amounts of civil society efforts around the poor- some of which are paternalistic -but lots of activity and interest.
Perla: Do tax incentives matter?
Rob: Tax incentives do matter, especially for high income givers. But the majority of Americans - 70% don't even itemize - they don't take advantage of the deductions. The impact is less strong than initially thought.
Perla: Is there any other research you are working on that would be of interest to nonprofits?
Rob: Yes, I'm also working on whether the domestic poor or international poor are needier and whether the American poor have claim before the global poor? Does the tax deduction play a role in steering donations one way or another? The Gates foundation has a massive program for global giving. Lots of people criticize the U.S. government for the small percentage of money spent on global aid, but if you add all the U.S. philanthropy, it's a lot of money. However, the foreign aid budget is publically decided and private philanthropy isn't. The comparable lack of benefit from someone from Hurricane Katrina receives from US aid - does that person have something to say about big foundations and how they spend their money?
Use your heart and head when giving
There’s a trend in philanthropy to treat the act of giving as an “investment decision”. This is partly because non-profit management is taught increasingly in business schools, and partly because more wealthy donors with a business background are are becoming involved.
Donors are younger, more active and may have made their money in finance. They believe, as I did until a couple of years ago, that there is a holy grail of metrics, and if we just worked harder to find it, we could measure all non-profits, lay them side by side and figure out which ones were more effective in doing good in the world. EDITOR’S CHOICE Charities take their cue from business - Mar-01 Internet auctions become star attractions - Feb-16 The donor landscape of 2033 is bright - Mar-01 A champion for the persecuted - Mar-08 High-flying individuals on a different path - Mar-15 The age of cyberspace offers aids for giving - Feb-12
What gets lost in all of this focus on evaluation and numbers is the grace and joy of philanthropy. Philanthropy inspires. It tells stories. It reconnects us with others and reminds us of our shared humanity.
Two years ago, I visited a local homeless shelter located between the train tracks and the bus depot. It provided homeless people with free breakfast, a place to hang out and referrals.
I asked the director, a Unitarian minister, how he measured effectiveness. I had expected him to say something about the number of people he had helped find jobs, or the number of breakfast sandwiches it handed out, etc. Instead, he replied simply: “Last year one of our [homeless] regulars died. We paid for his coffin and his burial. And 10 people, who he’d gotten to know here, showed up for his funeral.” He paused. “Does that answer your question?”
That sobering encounter made me think hard. The fact that the non-profit provided a place where a homeless person made friends who cared enough to go to his funeral – something that would not fit into anyone’s investment metrics – speaks volumes about how this non-profit made an impact on this person’s quality of life. The organisation did something incredibly decent for this homeless person at his death. It pulled at my conscience and my heart.
I shouldn’t be so surprised by this story’s effect on me. After all, recent research on philanthropy points to the fact that it is a highly emotional and social behaviour. The work of Deborah Small, a professor of marketing at Wharton business school, shows that presenting potential donors with metrics suppresses donations because it lowers empathy. It is empathy, her research says, that triggers giving.
This rings true intuitively – we’ve all pulled out our cheque books at some point at the sight of the picture of the child in India with a cleft palate.
That’s not to say that effectiveness does not matter and we should look only to our hearts. It matters a great deal, but the human dimension is just as important. Many non-profits are trying to make a difference in people’s lives. And that’s hard to do. People are not products. We are complicated – changing our attitudes, ideas and behaviours can take years and it’s difficult to isolate which single factor contributed to any specific result.
And so, when people ask, “how do I know whether this is a good non-profit?”, I respond as follows: “Go and visit. See for yourself. Volunteer for a soup kitchen and sit down next to an ex-felon. Ask them about their lives. What got them into trouble? How are they coping out of jail? How is this soup kitchen helping?” You will be amazed by the stories. It’s eye-opening, vivid and inspirational.
The other advantage of this first-hand approach is that you’ll see that the work of the non-profits extends beyond tangible, immediate or predictable results. Many such organisations – even those that provide direct services – also work to educate, change attitudes and affect policy. These efforts towards systemic change – think about the various efforts by environmental non-profits in the past 30 years – have a long pay-off timeline and only years later do we see the results of their efforts.
Philanthropy is all the more powerful because of these poignant stories. Let’s not rob such giving of its human pulse by regarding it only as an investment decision.
Bono, of the rock group U2, was inspired to become a philanthropist after travelling to Africa. “I saw it. I heard it. I felt it,” he said.
This is the gift of philanthropy. It will awaken you to the joys, sorrows and above all, the hopes of life and our world.
Fierce Debate on Merits of Strategic Philanthropy
A fiery debate took place at the recent Grantmakers For Effective Organizations conference in San Francisco between Bill Schambra, director of the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, and Paul Brest, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Ed Skloot, former president of the Surdna Foundation, was the moderator, but as Schambra and Brest volleyed responses back and forth, Skloot joked that he was really just “roadkill.”
Bill Schambra dismissed the notion that foundations should be driven by strategic philanthropy and its central premise of having a theory of change, upon which results are measured.
“It is wildly unrealistic to postulate a theory of change and expect anything like its typically complex, fragile chains of cause and effect to play out in real life,” he said.
Schambra noted that conservative foundations – Bradley, Olin, Scaife, and several others – are often held up as examples of strategic philanthropy. “That’s absurd,” he remarked. “These foundations merely capitalized on the political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. To be sure, here and there and at particularly critical moments, the conservative intellectual apparatus contributed a key study or funded an important legal case or held a useful conference. But the foundations mostly stood back and watched for opportunities presented by events driven by others, rather than trying to force circumstances by detailed strategic planning.”
“What foundations can do, I would suggest, is be serious, quiet, attentive students of their surroundings, watching carefully for opportunities to enhance slightly the trends that they applaud, and diminish slightly the trends that they deplore.”
On the other hand, Paul Brest argued that foundations can no longer navigate by sheer “intuition.” As in the fields of medicine and business, they need to become data driven. “It’s not rocket science, but foundations need a clear view of what they want to accomplish and measure if they are getting there,” he said.
Schambra responded, “What’s the point of everyone measuring if there’s no accepted measurement? Then we’d have hundreds of different ways of measuring, and it would be chaos and an insupportable burden to grantees.”
One of the attendees, Gregg Behr, president of the Grable Foundation, noted that most foundations probably walk a balance between the two opposites presented by Brest and Schambra. Foundations could be strategic on one hand with some types of grantmaking, and then when opportunities arise, be nimble enough to take advantage of opportunities. He gave the example of the decision of the Grable Foundation to pull funding from the public school system in Pittsburgh, PA. Grable Foundation had a strategy for improving public education and yet was flexible enough that when they saw the opportunity to team up with other foundations and take a dramatic step to call attention to the issue, they did.
This conference marked the 10th anniversary of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. The conference was attended by a sell-out crowd of over 600 grantmakers, nonprofits, and consultants.
The Public’s Low Confidence in Nonprofits
Trust is at the core of all human relationships and behaviors. To use a borrowed metaphor of the tree, trust is the root. Even though it's underground and not even visible most of the time, it is vital to the strength, stability and growth of the tree. Who have you ever helped that you don't trust? Now consider this question: What if people who are in a position to help your nonprofit don't trust it?
Public attitudes toward nonprofits are sharply negative and distrustful according to a 2005 NYU study:
15 percent said that they had a “great deal of confidence” in charitable organizations.
29 percent said charitable organizations do a very good job helping people.
19 percent said charitable organizations do a very good job running their programs and services.
16 percent said charitable organizations do a very good job at being fair in their decisions
66 percent of Americans said charitable organizations waste a great deal or fair amount of money
46 percent said the leaders of charitable organizations are paid too much.
The NYU study concluded, “these results place charitable organizations far down the list of civic and governmental institutions in overall public confidence.” Using the Gallup percentages as a marker, charitable organizations rank below the military, church, police, banks and public schools. Nonprofits rank just above television news in the public’s confidence.
This is what nonprofits are up against when they send out appeals for donors or volunteers:
Consumer Generated Ratings and Reviews are Trusted and Help Decision Making
Wow, I was stunned by how effective user generated reviews and ratings in influencing decisions. These stats are from the for-profit world, but gives us insights on behavior and expectations of the public:
71% of online shoppers read reviews, making it the most widely read consumer-generated content. (Forrester)
77% of online shoppers use reviews and ratings when purchasing (Jupiter Research, August 2006)
In a study of 2,000 shoppers - 92% deemed customer reviews as "extremely" or "very" helpful. (eTailing Group) 63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. (CompUSA & iPerceptions study)
Among first-time buyers on review-equipped sites, 42% said they were the primary factor. (Foresee Results Study, 2006)
86.9% of respondents said they would trust a friend's recommendation over a review by a critic, while 83.8% said they would trust user reviews over a critic. (MarketingSherpa)
When asked to note their most trusted information source, 60% of Canadian online buyers said consumer reviews compared to 31 per cent who said newspapers or magazines.(J.C. Williams Group for Visa and Yahoo Canada)
The Shop.org State of Retailing Online study, conducted by Forrester Research, found only 26% of the 137 top retailers surveyed offered customer ratings and reviews, but 96% of them ranked customer ratings and reviews as an effective or very effective tactic at driving conversion. (Forrester)
43% of retailers have reviews - double in one year (Marketing Sherpa, February 2007)
Ratings and Reviews is the second most important site feature behind search and online buyers who site ratings and reviews most useful site feature has more than doubled from '05 to '06. The report, entitled Retail Marketing: Driving Sales Through Consumer-Created Content, cites user-generated ratings and reviews as the second most important site feature behind search, and says that retailers who adopt ratings and reviews as a differentiator and retention strategy will gain market share. (Jupiter)
Deborah Small Interview
Latest research on giving behavior - Why vivid, storytelling appeals inspire giving
I had read of Wharton marketing professor Deborah Small's pathbreaking research on how statistics can suppresses giving. I followed up with her by phone with this interview about how nonprofits can use her research to more effectively fundraise…
Q: There are so many nonprofits trying to figure out how to fundraise better. Your research on appealing to emotion is path-breaking…Can you elaborate on how people can appeal to emotion? I know you use the example of one child and you say it should be a "vivid" story. Can you elaborate on that?
A: The more vivid the story – through narrative or through imagery – the more emotionally arousing. And emotions are what triggers the impetus to help. The more surprising finding is that showing statistics can actually blunt this emotional response by causing people to think in a more calculative, albeit uncaring manner.
Q: Are there some people – for whom augmenting these emotional appeals with statistics would be useful?
A: We typically look at averages. Certainly, if you have more intellectual and knowledgeable people, they will care more about the statistics, –but most people most of the time respond negatively so an advertisement is not the place for statistics. Put them somewhere on your website; if people want to find it, they will find it But don't put it in standard advertising. There's so much advertising clutter in the world so you need to focus on catching people's attention and moving them to act by triggering emotion.
Q: What are other things that you think would be fruitful for research to explore on whether it has an effect on people's giving?
A: Some of my research shows that sympathy is particularly responsive to changes to someone's condition. A lot of decision making research demonstrates that human beings are insensitive to absolute values and only respond to changes. For instance, when you put your foot in a cold pool on a hot day it feels cold because of the contrast with the outside temperature. However the water does not feel so cold when you have been in the water for a while. In other words, it is the change in temperature