Martin Brookes of NPC wrote last week about the results of a YouGov poll, which showed that while donors care about how well (or badly) the charities they support are doing, they don’t necessarily want to hear about who’s performing best. Sean Stannard-Stockton picked up on this over on his Tactical Philanthropy blog, making some important points about what this all means, and Jacob Harold, Philanthropy Program Officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation added his thoughts too.
To recap: most donors say they care about how well charities are achieving the impact they aim to achieve; but most do not seek out research to help them give to effective charities. Sean believes that donors are more interested in getting help to achieve their personal philanthropic goals than in being told who to give to. Jacob points out that sometimes people don’t know that they want something until it’s offered to them (like philanthropy advice). And even helping the minority of donors who might already be interested in seeking out data to inform their giving, he argues, can influence huge flows of capital.
My experience at NPC resonates with all these points. Giving is driven by the heart, not by the head. Either we can try to make people more rational (unless we can find people who are basically Vulcans, this doesn’t sound too promising) or we can find ways of incorporating impact and effectiveness into people’s existing motivations for giving. In other words, we find ways of making effective giving a default behaviour.
For example, giving vehicles like Donor Advised Funds, Community Foundations, and online giving marketplaces could incorporate due diligence to ensure a certain level of effectiveness of all the programmes donors fund through them. Philanthropy advisers could provide a standard level of reviewing impact in all their work. We could even look at philanthropy from the other side and suggest that all charities should answer some basic questions about their impact in their public communications.
Recent research from Hope Consulting sheds some light on the subject of donor motivations, and gives us some fascinating insights. It finds that wealthy donors are not different from regular donors – in contrast to what’s often written about wealthy donors caring more about the impact of their donations. It says all donors can be characterised as one of six types of givers: Repayer, Casual Giver, Faith Based, See The Difference, Personal Ties or High Impact. And High Impact makes up just 16% of all donors.
What’s my point? Well, it sometimes seems like the effective philanthropy movement is trying to make all donors change their motivations for giving so we end up with 100% High Impact donors. Instead, I believe we need six different strategies, finding ways of incorporating impact and effectiveness into the motivations of these different giving segments.
How do we make Casual Givers more effective? Maybe through payroll giving programmes that include incorporate effectiveness as the default option. How do we make See The Difference donors more effective? Maybe by helping them learn how to spot signs of high impact and high performance in local charities they visit. How to build impact into Personal Ties giving? Maybe a club for donors to meet high impact charities.
One thing’s clear – in the drive to make philanthropy more effective, one size definitely doesn’t fit all.
Do you have ideas about how to fuse impact into giving for any of these segments? Or even thoughts about segmenting those that aren’t currently giving? I’d love to hear from you – please post your thoughts below.
As an online marketplace, we have started asking charities for the ‘impact’ of their projects. We aren’t setting a minimum level of effectiveness, but we are letting donors see how charities describe their impact.
(e.g. http://new.thebiggive.org.uk/projects/view/7721 )
As well as incorporating (‘nudging’) this information for donors, we’ve spent time considering how we ask charities for this information. The word “impact” is often misinterpreted (especially by government press officers…), and charities can be unsure how to communicate their effectiveness to donors.
Resources such as NPC’s Little Blue Book are a really useful step towards defining these questions, and I hope these blog discussions will help donors and charities (and us) to understand more about “impact”.
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Nicely written! Rings true with my experience with donors (or any client advising) – meet the customer where he/she is (their own mental framework) and work from there to help them learn what rings true for them and develop the next steps they want to take.
Keep up the great work at NPC – Tony Macklin
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As a known sceptic about measurement-mania it’s interesting to me that advocates of this approach are having to find ever-more elaborate scenarios to avoid the more obvious conclusion that their basic asumptions are flawed. I’m glad that many of thse assumptions are at least being raised up , but the “view from the field”in this debate is completely missing – it’s dominated by donors and their advisers looking down from the top – yet it is non-profits on the ground that feel the impact of new approaches most of all, and many of them are hurting badly. Last week I was in Toronto discussing “Small Change” with Canadian philanthropy and non-profit leaders and heard about the Canadian Government’s decision to remove funding from CCIC – the Canadian Council for International Co-operation – the national non-profit network that has been doing sterling work for the last 40 years. What reason did the government give? “Effectiveness criteria of sustainable development results. We have many NGO organizations and partners that are actually feeding children who are starving.” So learning, advocacy and network-building no longer count, literally and metaphorically, yet changes in government development policy – whch CCIC has helped to bring about – could have a far greater impact than expanded non-profit service provision. Is this an isolated example? I don’t think so, and it points to a hugely-important conclusion: there are no universally-accepted measures of non-profit performance, only different interpretations of what different people think are important and significant, and that’s why it’s so dangerous to use data to “drive resources to high-performing organizations” rather than for learning and sharing. I hope those who are pushing narrow aproaches to impact-measurement are aware of the damage they may be doing. After all, isn’t that what acountability is all about? Fran Barrett and I are organizing an event at the Foundation Center in New York later in the year to get at these issues, so I will post details of that event when I have them.
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