Two weeks ago, we issued a challenge for people to help our top-rated charity, VillageReach, tell its story in a more compelling way. We got a lot of responses, many of them very thoughtful and interesting. Here’s a summary.

Making it personal (and tangible)

Many of the suggestions revolved around telling tangible, personal stories of individuals, something that there isn’t much of in VillageReach’s current website content. As Carrie (who emailed in) said, “Individual givers want to save kids and moms and dads with faces and names; and hear their stories in not just facts, but feelings.”

Katya Andresen of Network for Good suggests telling the story of a health worker:

if UPS can build a brand around its brown-clad delivery folks, surely VillageReach can spin some amazing tales about the brave people driving trucks into the middle of nowhere with life-saving vaccines on board. Go out and interview everyone who moves supplies around Mozambique and ask them what it’s like to be behind the wheel of hope. That’s a story I want to hear – and a cause I want to fund.

Commenter Susan Schindehette makes a similar proposal, with specific ideas for how to create a compelling video. Excerpt:

Find one of these workers who’s from humble beginnings herself, get her a Flipcam and have her shoot away. See the world through her eyes, from her own hardscrabble home, through her journey for Village Reach, and then end the story with a little baby in her lap who’s going to live because of the medical supplies she just delivered. Voiceover: “I know what it means to be sick with no medicine. And it’s a good thing to make sure that won’t happen to her.”

Commenter Robert Mundy also supports this idea, writing, “I want to hear from the people that make VillageReach possible.”

Commenter Carrick prefers to hear from the beneficiaries of improved health systems (i.e., the people whose lives/family members’ lives were saved), rather than the workers. Carrick critiques the story currently on VillageReach Focus, writing:

the VillageReach website contains a story about a woman they serve, and although her circumstances certainly sound terrible, they’re not described in a compelling way—nor does it describe the tremendous benefit VillageReach has to her life. If anything, it suggests that VillageReach isn’t doing enough for her, since she still has to walk two hours to get to the health center. Personally, I would tell the story of someone who suffered and struggled, and then finally found VillageReach, which saved them or their child’s life.

On the tangibility front, Katya wonders if VillageReach’s emphasis on tracking could help:

Because VillageReach is about logistics, what if you used that as a huge advantage? You can put a map up and show, in near real time – what supplies are being moved where thanks to donor support.

Keeping it simple

Several critiqued the complexity and difficulty of VillageReach’s current web content. Jeff Brooks of Future Fundraising Now writes:

The website resolutely refuses to speak the language of ordinary people. It’s squarely aimed at experts and insiders … VillageReach is like a smart, geeky, promising adolescent; they are apparently not interested in connecting with people outside their circle …

Complexity may be necessary to accomplish program goals, but it kills fundraising. Simplify! …

If the “smart giving” movement is going to be any more than a euphemism for the “stupid marketing” movement, nonprofits like VillageReach are going to have to grow up, go beyond themselves, swallow their pride, and enter the world of real-life donors.

Commenters Robert Mundy and Alice agree that the current website comes off as technical and jargony. So does emailer Carrie:

Cold chain supply? rMIS? openLMIS? Great system names, but they leave a black hole in the reader’s mind. Descriptive names would have more appeal and create understanding. Your corporate donors on the other hand may be fascinated by the buzz words. Save it for them in – speeches or special collateral outreach.

On the topic of simplicity, I was particularly intrigued by Duane Kuroda’s claim:

Impact and results by a charity satisfy something I call the minimum logic requirement – that minimum about of proof where a donation is not a bad idea, and the charity has more or less equal footing for donation $. Then, the emotional aspect can kick in. If a donor has to choose from charity A or B after the logical stats have been evaluated, then the one with the biggest emotional response has the best chance.

Obviously, I don’t see myself – or most GiveWell donors – as following this pattern. But it may be true that the vast majority of donors do, and this would pose a substantial challenge to the “smart giving” movement.

Putting the emphasis on donors & fundraising

Brigid Slipka feels that the website is not aggressive enough in soliciting donations:

ASK. ASK. ASK. Go through website page by page and every time you are making a case for what VillageReach achieves, end it with an ask. Be specific: “Be a part of our success story by giving a donation today” and link directly to donation page. After a while, you can use Google Analytics to see which donation links are clicked on the most. Keep those and remove the others.

She makes a large number of specific suggestions throughout the website, which we recommend that anyone interested in the details of this case check out.

Sean Stannard-Stockton writes:

My suggestion for Village Reach, and for any nonprofit struggling to raise money in support of effective programs, is to realize that donors want to become a part of your story. As consumers, people buy products which help them be the person they want to be. I believe that donors want to do the same thing. We donate as a way to “self-actualize”, to most fully become the person we believe we are.

If the smart giving movement wants a world full of robust nonprofits, we need to recognize that sales and marketing is just as critical of a business function as program development and delivery.

How important is it to improve the messaging?

Commenters Alexander and McKay question the premise of our challenge, asking whether VillageReach really wants to be targeting the masses and saying that relationships – including with larger funders – may be more key to VillageReach’s fundraising than how it tells its story.

On the flip side, commenter Susan Schindehette on our blog and commenter Bo on Katya’s blog express conviction that there is a strong, emotionally compelling story here if it can be told right. Susan writes:

Village Reach says that it trains “health system personnel to become logistics specialists, delivering medical supplies to all the hard-to-reach villages so that health workers working in remote health centers are no longer responsible for making the long journeys to collect their own supplies.” HELLO!!? That’s what, in the business, we call a “story”!

Bottom line

We really appreciate all the feedback, although it’s going to be up to VillageReach whether and how it ultimately wants to change its storytelling.

Overall, I think these responses are an interesting illustration of the challenges faced by the “smart giving” movement. We want to help donors give to projects that are more impactful, and more in need of funds, than where they give now. Yet for the vast majority of donors, the most compelling pitches are likely to revolve around the tangible, the specific and the simple – all of which describe the opposite of a good impact evaluation.

To my mind, that’s a substantial tension, and a good reason for those interested in “smart giving” to think of themselves – at least for the foreseeable future – as targeting a niche market, not the general population.

We’re about halfway through December, which is historically when the vast majority of donations go through our website. Here’s a quick update on where things stand.

So far this year, we’ve seen significantly more money (over 3x as much) go to our recommended charities, directly through the GiveWell website, compared to last year.

The second chart above excludes December, as this month has generally completely dwarfed the others in terms of donations made through our website. The following chart shows daily donations made in December, during which the trend has continued.

Note that all charts above exclude all offline donations / donations made through other sites attributed to GiveWell; they are only capturing donations that were made directly via the GiveWell website. We’ll be giving a full overview of our estimated “money moved” when we release our annual self-evaluation in a few months.

Our web traffic is also up this year, driven primarily by an increase in organic (i.e., non-AdWords) search traffic.

We’re seeing strong growth that isn’t attributable to any particular one-off event, so we’re optimistic about future growth.

We’ve spent years looking for the most outstanding organizations we can find – organizations with demonstrable, cost-effective, powerful impacts on people’s lives. As of now, out of hundreds examined with a systematic process, we’ve found one that we think is particularly outstanding. It isn’t just outstanding by our criteria – it’s also strong on a lot of the aspects we purposefully de-emphasize but others value, such as the chance to make a large-scale and sustainable contribution well beyond its budget (more). There’s only one problem: it’s in the sector of health system logistics.

It’s been observed before that fundraising seems to work best when you can connect a person’s gift to a tangible, emotional impact. Heifer International can tell you about the “cow you’re giving for Christmas” and how it (ideally) will affect its recipient’s life. Grameen Foundation has anecdotes (example) of women who’ve used a loan as a catalyst to pull themselves out of poverty. DonorsChoose can even arrange for you to get thank-you notes from the students you’ve bought supplies for.

VillageReach’s activities include

• Training health system personnel to become logistics specialists, delivering medical supplies to all the hard-to-reach villages so that health workers working in remote health centers are no longer responsible for making the long journeys to collect their own supplies.
• Developing logistics management information system software to enable more accurate collection and reporting of health data in remote communities.
• Creating a social business to bring propane from south Mozambique to north Mozambique so that refrigerators in health centers can be more reliably powered, and can keep vaccines cold.

How do you tell that story?

One possible response is “Don’t.” In a world full of good causes, why worry about delivery systems, information management and propane in Mozambique, when we can focus on charities with more tangible, “sellable” work?

Yet we feel this response would be tantamount to defeat for the “smart giving” movement. VillageReach embodies the strengths this movement looks for – strengths that are all too hard to find most of the time. After all, if you’re bringing in tens of millions using a decades-old story, why bother with evaluation and accountability for the work happening today? What good is real impact if it isn’t rewarded with funding?

We want to see VillageReach turn its great program into a great pitch, but we’re no good at storytelling. So we’re asking for help.

If you are good at helping charities tell their stories, and you support the ideals of the “smart giving” movement, we’d like your thoughts on how VillageReach can better sell its work.

Give your advice via blog post, or blog comment, or email to us. If you make your own blog post, please make sure to notify us via email or by linking to your post in a comment here.

We’ll round up the best submissions in a future post.

Some basic materials to work off of:

• VillageReach – main website
• VillageReach-Focus: a new project of VillageReach hoping to deliver more intimate, real-time information on its progress
• Our 2009 blog post giving an informal discussion of VillageReach’s strengths and weaknesses
• A more recent blog post on some additional strengths of VillageReach

Thanks to Katya Andresen for inspiring the title of this post

Last year, we and many other groups came together in a joint press release on the “worst way to pick a charity.”. We argued that the simple, “one-size-fits-all” metric of the overhead ratio is a red herring, and that deeper analysis is needed to make sure your gift accomplishes good.

But many donors don’t have time for deeper – or any – analysis. To help them, this year three organizations – GiveWell, Philanthropedia and Root Cause – have come together with a list of 6 recommended charities.

Each of our organizations has recommended two charities, using our distinctive methodologies. Note that we haven’t vetted each others’ recommendations and do not necessarily endorse each others’ endorsements – but we think it’s important to show donors (even donors with very little time) what sorts of options they have, publicly and centrally.

As our release states, and as we’ve written before many times in the past (most recent discussion here), we think that there is currently far too much emphasis on avoiding bad charities, with the implication being that it’s fine to give to whatever charity asks most loudly once you’ve determined that they aren’t literally stealing your money. We want to change the subject from “How can donors avoid the very worst charities?” to “How can they seek out the very best?” This joint list of recommended charities is a step in that direction.

Full release – including the six charity recommendations – here

We’ve been working on a lot of changes and additions to the main GiveWell website and at this point have gone live with all of the following:

New research and recommendations on U.S. education and early childhood care. We did some work on these causes in our first year, but we’ve now gone back with our improved and more thorough research methodology.

• We’ve systematically reviewed literature on effective social programs from ChildTrends, Campbell Collaboration, Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy and MDRC.
• We’ve conducted a systematic search for charities focused on programs with strong evidence behind them.
• Our top recommendations in this cause are still Nurse-Family Partnership and KIPP, the only organizations we’ve found with both strong evidence of impact and ongoing reporting on performance. We also now recommend Invest in Kids, a small group in Colorado, and have a few more potential recommended charities under investigation.

Do-It-Yourself Charity Evaluation. If you’re looking to do your own due diligence, examining a charity or cause we haven’t covered, check out our DIY guide for suggested critical questions you can ask. We’ve covered every charitable cause we can find or think of.

This is the first donor guide we’re aware of that asks different questions for charities in different causes, rather than taking a “one-size-fits-all” approach. While it means some extra overhead in classifying your charity, it also means we’ve been able to make the questions much more concrete, specific and meaningful.

This is very much “beta” content, with room for improvement in the questions themselves and in the guide’s usability, and we are very interested in your feedback. (Note that Tactical Philanthropy and Chronicle of Philanthropy Online have already discussed this new feature.)

New ratings system. We wrote back in October that we were preparing to scrap out quantitative ratings system for charities. We have now done so. We still give marks of distinction to our top-rated charities, and we still discuss the charities that don’t get these marks of distinction, but we no longer have a “zero-to-three-star rating” for each charity. See the new details of our ratings system.

Charity downgrades. We’ve completed our annual review of our recommended charities, in which we request updated performance information, sometimes request more detailed information than we did in the first place, and rethink our evaluation in general. Three of these charities have received downgrades:

• Stop Tuberculosis Partnership remains a recommended charity, but no longer has our highest (“Gold Medal”) distinction due to some concerns about the ongoing vigilance of its monitoring and evaluation. We are still in conversations with Stop TB and may update the review again soon if and when we receive more information.
• Partners in Health has not provided us with updated and expanded information on its activities. We no longer consider it a recommended (Silver or Gold medal) organization, though we still give it the distinction of being Notable for its promising approach (and stand behind our recommendation in the context of the Haiti earthquake specifically).
• We have done some additional analysis on The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria and no longer consider it a recommended (Silver or Gold medal) organization. It was previously the lowest-rated of our recommended organizations (on the bubble of being recommended), and our more in-depth look at its monitoring and evaluation reports has left us with too many questions about its evidence of effectiveness. We still give this organization the distinction of being Notable for its transparency, and in fact we still feel that it is a model of exceptional transparency for an organization of its size.

Part of what’s going on here is a gradual raising of our bar, as we have capacity for more analysis and a substantially higher opinion of our top-rated charity VillageReach than we had last year. (In addition to a site visit that involved a lot of time spent discussing and improving our understanding of the organization, we also have updated, concrete, encouraging information on the group’s expansion plans / room for more funding.)

New external evaluations of GiveWell’s work. We have begun accumulating formal reviews of our research from non-staff members; some are scholars in relevant fields while others are simply willing volunteers. We have published the reviews we have so far and intend to add more at a faster pace from here, now that we’ve nailed down the basic ground rules of how to do external reviews of different parts of our work. Note that we have also begun collecting endorsements as a quick sign of our credibility for website visitors.

What’s next: within the next few months we will be publishing

• Extensive notes from our several months in India, including site visits to over 15 organizations.
• Research and recommendations on the general cause of disaster relief/reconstruction.
• Our annual self-evaluation.