GiveWell Founder Talks Evaluation and Changing the Culture of Philanthropy
With a hat-tip to Edith Asibey of Asibey Consulting, here's an interesting Chronicle of Philanthropy online chat with Holden Karnofsky of the nonprofit evaluator Give Well and the "world's first transparent grant maker" Clear Fund. Karnofsky is a fierce devotee of evaluation and the meaningful assessment of effectiveness. As the Chronicle explains:
The Clear Fund, now in the process of awarding about $140,000 in grants, asks its grant applicants to provide hard evidence that they are effective. It publishes its assessment of that evidence on the GiveWell Web site, whether it decides the group is worthy of support or not.
Holden's thoughts are available daily at The Give Well blog. He's got all sorts of interesting pearls of wisdom throughout the Chronicle chat, including:
- Guys, are we all together on this? The "straw ratio" (percentage of revenue spent on programs as opposed to administration) is meaningless? Charity Navigator is a farce? Are we all sick of the way the media repeats these same lies over and over again? What can we do about it? How can we break the spell that's been cast on all these reporters? Serious question. This is one of the few times I would consider joining some club or signing some petition or being in some "movement" or "protest." Ideas?
- I don't think reducing administrative and fundraising costs should be a priority. At all. Increasing overhead so you can study the problems charities are working on, and how well-suited their strategies are to address these problems, has far more potential to improve results than reducing overhead so we can spend a few extra bucks on strategies that haven't been critically evaluated.
In response to Edith's own question about the propensity of some nonprofits to question the value of evaluation, Karnofsky wrote in part:
Sounds completely true to me ... yet doesn't diminish the need for evaluation, because without it, you learn NOTHING. The fact is that intuition is nothing like a reasonable substitute for observation - the whole history of science is the history of that fact hitting us repeatedly in the face. This is a really good and tough question. By its nature, the question of whether to measure has to be answered without the facts at hand, meaning through intuition, analogy, etc., which is somewhat ironic and frustrating.