Blog Posts: Nonprofit Evaluation

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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