Blog Posts: Charity Evaluations

Posted November 29, 2011 by Al Mueller 0 comments

Before you evaluate nonprofit performance, stop and ask 3 questions about the charity:

1. Is the charity trying to create a long-term solution to a problem?
2. Does the charity want to grow bigger and bigger every year?
3. Has the charity identified Key Performance Indicators?

These 3 questions are all related to OUTCOMES.  Outcome measurement and outcome-based evaluations have taken center stage in the contemporary debate about nonprofit performance.  I, for one, am a voice and supporter of this trend.  However, we can’t let the trend rewrite each organization’s goals.  Some charity’s just don’t exist to produce the savory long-term, ever-increasing, measurable outcomes that have become all the rage.  So if we are going to determine how well an organization is performing, we must first figure out what standards we can and cannot use to evaluate performance.  

Tags: Charity Evaluation, Charity Evaluations, Nonprofit Evaluation, Nonprofit Performance, Performance Standard

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Posted October 11, 2011 by Al Mueller 0 comments

I started Nonprofit Analytics because I knew we could do better than all other online charity evaluators.  So I’m biased against Charity Navigator from the start.  Anyone who reads our detailed feature comparison between Nonprofit Analytics vs. Charity Navigator vs. Guidestar knows where I see other major players lacking.  When Charity Navigator announced an upgrade to their ratings system last month, they received a round of compliments.  I myself do appreciate the direction they are going but still see fundamental problems.  I’ve laid out some of those concerns in my latest Alliance Magazine post: New Charity Navigator ratings based on old tax forms.

Tags: Charity Evaluation, Charity Evaluations

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Posted March 27, 2011 by Al Mueller 0 comments

Do you want to know if you are supporting effective and efficient nonprofit organizations?  You can.  That is what the Nonprofit Analytics web platform is designed to do.  I’ve stopped blogging for the past 4 months to launch it as soon as we could.

I have been working on this project for almost 2 years with my coworkers at Excellence In Giving.  We have evaluated all other online resources for making smart giving decisions and decided that our platform would outperform all of them.

Tags: Charity Evaluation, Charity Evaluations, Due Diligence, Nonprofit Analytics, Nonprofit Evaluation, Strategic Giving

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Posted November 11, 2010 by Al Mueller 0 comments

A money manager recently asked me: “Is it difficult for Excellence in Giving to find philanthropists who will pay for charity evaluations?” The simple answer is “yes.” Although blogs and news articles are beginning to recognize the field of philanthropic advising, most big and small philanthropists do not recognize the value of paying experts to evaluate potential grantees. They do want to support the best organizations but typically balk at the idea of putting significant money into the necessary research that identifies high-performing, well-managed, difference-making nonprofits. Most of the time that hesitation results in donations given to a number of “good” organizations but not necessarily the “best.” Sometimes it means donors unwittingly support scandalous frauds.

Last week an Excellence in Giving client sent a grant request from the Texas Highway Patrol Association & Museum (THPA) to our research team for review. A couple hours later we had scandal, suspicious money trails, and felonies in the report.

Tags: Charity Evaluation, Charity Evaluations, Nonprofit Evaluation

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Posted August 17, 2010 by Al Mueller 0 comments

None of us wants to be judged for not doing what we never tried to do. But it happens all the time. One nonprofit I recently critiqued responded with this exact complaint, “You can’t say we have failed to become partially self-sustaining when we have not made that an explicit goal for the last ten years.” The complaint was justified. I had to modify my critique to read: if a donor wants a self-sustaining model, this organization has not developed it in the last ten years.

So how do we create a ‘fair’ performance standard for measuring nonprofit outcomes? In the world of business investments, analysts can run the numbers and get a clear record of expenses, revenue, and profit. In the nonprofit world, measuring performance is more elusive. There is no absolute standard that applies equally to organizations operating in different program and geographic areas. The only fair approach is comparing the relative performance of organizations in the same sectors.

Tags: Charity Evaluation, Charity Evaluations, Due Diligence, Nonprofit Evaluation, Performance Standard

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Posted April 28, 2010 by Al Mueller 0 comments

“We’ve reached a total of 2.5 million people.” I read claims like this one from many nonprofit organizations. The sheer size of the number is intended to impress potential donors. However, totals don’t tell the whole story. One family ministry that has reached 2.5 million people in the last 34 years actually is in decline. The number of clients served has been dropping by thousands since 2006. In more alarming fashion donations have increased 18% during that time (significant for a $40 million operation) while clients served has declined 7%. Those trendlines tell the story that matters today. The organization’s heyday has come and gone.

An informed practitioner of philanthropic due diligence is not easily taken by totals. The most valuable data is found in a time series not a “total” column.

Tags: Charity Evaluation, Charity Evaluations, Due Diligence, Nonprofit Performance, Performance Standard

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