Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy has launched a philanthropic advisory service for giving customized advice to major donors. According to Give and Take, the firm is already advising roughly $35 million worth of future gifts. This is good news because Sean is, among other things, a longtime advocate for extreme transparency in the nonprofit sector….
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“A” for effort?
Sean at Tactical Philanthropy has continued his discussion of “high-performing” vs. “high-impact” organizations, which we previously commented on. The message he is sending (see posts here and here) is partly that we need to take the emphasis off of “funding organizations that have shown results” and put it on “funding organizations that seem ‘on the…
CARE evaluations
How transparent is CARE? On one hand, it maintains a site at www.careevaluations.org that currently lists 448 project evaluation documents (352 of which are in English). We haven’t found anything comparable for any other of what we call the “household name” charities – enormous, well-known, aggressively fundraising international aid charities (usually members of the InterAction…
GiveWell grant: Open application
We welcome applications for $250,000 in funding for economic empowerment in sub-Saharan Africa, to be disbursed by 12/31/2009. Interested charities should read the full details of our application process and then submit our first-round application. Why we are making this grant: in 2008 we received $250,000 earmarked specifically for regranting to a top organization working…
High-impact nonprofits are rare, but worth funding
Following up on Thursday’s Alliance for Effective Social Investing meeting, Sean at Tactical Philanthropy writes: A high performance nonprofit is a very well run organization. It has outstanding leadership, clear goals, an ethic of monitoring performance and making adjustments as needed, and it is financially healthy. A high impact nonprofit is one whose efforts have…
A small charity that meets our criteria
As we’ve written before, we tend – deliberately – not to focus on charities that are small and/or “experimental” in nature. From what we’ve seen, these charities rarely can demonstrate that their program has “worked” (in the sense of changing lives) before, and so the only way to evaluate them is to have a deep…