Disclaimer: GiveWell failed to be named as one of NetSquared’s featured projects. Therefore, if you are incapable of making your own judgments about what you read (based on content rather than author), you should assume that the blog post that follows is just me being “bitter,” and you should load a reputable news site immediately before you read something dangerous. Those who are comfortable differentiating reasonable from unreasonable, feel free to proceed.
As of last Wednesday at ~8pm est,
- NetSquared had recently closed its online balloting to choose the featured projects for its upcoming conference.
- Many concerns had been expressed over the completely open online ballot.
- No one knew yet who had voted, how many people had voted, or how many votes were based in any way on content of proposals (as opposed to emails from friends).
- No one knew which projects had won yet.
- No one knew anything about the projects themselves, beyond what was written up briefly in their proposals.
- There had been close to zero substantive discussion of the proposals.
And here was what people were saying about it:
- Phil proclaimed the vote a “watershed event for democracy.”
- I eagerly anticipated other blogs’ making fun of him for jumping the gun. Phil is a good and thought-provoking writer who is not always what we would call “reserved” in tone.
- Lucy agreed with Phil.
- So did the normally reserved Sean.
- In the wake of criticism, Sean insisted that “NetSquared is already a success” – not because of its voting process (the original thing that had set off Phil), but because the projects that are going to be featured are “great.” (Keep in mind that the sum total of our knowledge on these projects still consists of ~1000 words submitted by their leaders.)
To be clear, I think NetSquared is an exciting idea. But where I come from, people celebrate a new client the day the client signs, not the day they decide to call the client and see if they’re interested. “Great research projects” refers to ideas that have been studied and stress-tested to death and produced returns, not to the ideas we had in this morning’s meeting. So as I’ve made clear, I’ve been pretty surprised by the extent to which people have called paragraphs on a screen “great projects,” and pointed to a “success” and “watershed event” where I saw an online poll that hadn’t even been tallied yet.
And while I can only speak to what I’ve seen, this doesn’t strike me as an isolated incident. The charities I’ve examined constantly use the word “success” to refer to mosquito nets purchased or children enrolled in an after-school program, or even in many cases simply dollars spent or plans made. Much of the literature I’ve read on grantmaking tells stories of “great grantmaking,” stories that end with the funds disbursed. Call me crazy, but for a humanitarian charity I associate “success” with “lives changed.”
Sure, that’s hard to measure. Yes, many of the things we celebrate in the for-profit sector are more concrete. But this post isn’t about the process of evaluation (I’ve written plenty about that, and will write plenty more); it’s about the mentality. When you’re used to seeing the results of your actions, you’re used to the world’s working much less smoothly than your imagination does. You assume a huge chasm between a great idea and a great result. You put the bar for “success” a lot higher, and that pushes you to get a lot better. I wish I saw more of this mentality from the sector whose job it is to bring about the world’s most important (and often most difficult) changes.
Our fundraising efforts have started, and dang, do I hate asking for money. For three years, I’ve had way more income than I can spend, and I’ve rarely had to ask anyone for anything. That’s a nice position to be in. This – especially for an abrasive guy like me – is tough.
That’s why you should be concerned that philanthropy is currently seen as something to do with the “second half” of your life. “Second half” here isn’t just chronological – it’s referring to the half that specifically isn’t where the philanthropist made their name. The second half is the half that lacks risk, accountability, and the people who keep one honest (a set of factors collectively known as the “eye of the tiger”). All the great foundations today are following the orders of people who’ve made their fortune doing something else, and who no longer have to consider any criticism they don’t care for. I have to believe that matters, no matter how good their intentions. 
In addition to ~20 charity/philanthropy/social-goodliness blogs, I read one blog, 
The thing is, in the business world it’s obvious to everyone that good isn’t good enough. You need to be the BEST, within your area, or else capital is better spent on your competitors – and you’re going to go under. But I don’t see why this is any less true of the nonprofit sector – all of it except the part about going under. Right now, there’s no mechanism for charitable capital (donations from individuals) to flow to where it’s best used, and that means no mechanism for inferior charities to go under, and THAT means no constant pressure to get better. That’s what we’re trying to change, because we think the people served by charities deserve the same relentless improvement and scrutiny that the people served by businesses benefit from.
Over 150 projects have been submitted for the NetSquared conference at the end of May, and only 20 will get to go. The winners will be determined by an online vote, open until this Saturday afternoon … and you know what that means:
This has been our goal since last August, but we have come a long way in terms of strategy. Originally, our strategy was to do research on a part-time/”hobby” basis, and slap it all on a public website. As we discovered just how much there is to find, we investigated the idea of operating like Wikipedia: putting a lot of work into a basic structure that would allow thousands or millions of people to build the project up with their small contributions. But as we realized just how complex these problems are, and just how hard it is to find any useful information (and how useful it is to have large donations to use as leverage), we concluded that there’s really only one strategy that will achieve our goal well. That strategy is to create The Clear Fund: the world’s first charitable grantmaker whose reason for existence is to make its decisions accessible, useful, usable, and criticizable for all.