MY SPECIALTIES:
In less than 2 weeks, 2M+ refugees have fled Ukraine. The UN Refugee Agency projects up to 4 million people may flee in total and another 6.7M people will be internally displaced if fighting continues. Christian ministries from around the world have responded to the crisis by providing emergency aid. Below is a list of 4 organizations who are uniquely positioned to bring help and hope to suffering Ukrainians on the ground.
The best charity evaluation platform just got better, deeper, simpler, and automated. But what’s really changed? Starting in September 2019, subscribers now have 5 NEW FEATURES:
Why give money to support good intentions when our nonprofit strategy, finance, leadership, and impact data can show you who’s really making a difference? Set up one-click access on your mobile device today to search our nonprofit database and select which charities you want to get notified about new performance updates on your Member Dashboard. Monitoring and evaluating charities just got so much easier!
Reinventing Philanthropy gets under your skin like a dentist’s advice to floss. You know in your head you should do it but don’t always feel like taking the time. Eric Friedman simply wants giving to be effective. What does that mean? He wants people to engage in thinking critically about the world’s greatest needs and our best solutions. He is frustrated. “Giving is too often about making the donor feel better and too infrequently about making those in need better” (12). So Friedman wants to reinvent philanthropy and make the new normal—utilitarian, issue-agnostic donors who support charities offering “the greatest help to the greatest number of people” (182). How does Friedman motivate donors to practice high-impact philanthropy?
Where can donors get answers to their questions about charity efficiency and effectiveness? Nonprofit Analytics. Nonprofit Analytics now publishes up-to-date answers to the most common questions donors ask.
No other online platform tackles all these important questions. Only Nonprofit Analytics presents up-to-date nonprofit performance in one simple page. Nonprofit Analytics still offers 160 data points about leadership, finances, strategy and impact via downloadable 2-page nonprofit Analytical Overviews for paid subscribers. However, donors who want the highlights without all the numbers and trend lines can now get what they want for free. Nonprofit Analytics’s 2013 release of nonprofit effectiveness and efficiency data finally makes it possible to give wisely without investing much time.
International adoptions have dropped 60% since 2004. UN policies, government regulations and high costs are to blame. Millions of orphans suffer through life without a healthy family context. All these facts that Both Ends Burning, STUCK, and now Foster Friess are sharing are true. But you won’t find my name on the STUCK petition at change.org or my footprints in DC during the May 17 “step forward for orphans march.” I’ve learned too much to believe international adoption is a scalable solution for a world full of orphans.
Do you still enjoy your giving? In a world of professional philanthropy conferences, philanthropy journals and “giving gone wrong” headlines, giving can become one more skill to master or task to manage. My daily research into the performance and impact of grantees has the real potential to strip away the joy of generosity. It can become all head and no heart. Site visits can feel like audits. Grant impact reports can relieve the worry of wasting gifts rather than excite you about the difference the gift has made.
To be honest, you may wonder if it really matters.
Are foundations making good grants? I see positive trends to applaud and emulate in the latest Money for Good II study that surveyed foundation giving decisions. If you want to find out how many hours of research foundations are doing before issuing grants and how much their findings affect new gifts, check out my recent post about Positive Trends in Foundation Grant-making at the Council on Foundations RE:Philanthropy blog.
What if your donation to fight human trafficking paid the salary of a human trafficker? What if your donation to support widowed law enforcement families went to a felon’s bank account? What if your child sponsorship monthly donation and letters never helped the girl in the picture? What if you gave money to loan to a struggling entrepreneur in Africa that was actually embezzled by loan officers? In the last year, I have seen each one of these nightmares come true. It could have been avoided. Read how in my latest Alliance magazine article Giving poorly can be worse than not giving at all.
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.
How do you identify a community’s most outstanding needs? How do you know what can effectively address those needs? How can you best leverage your charitable giving to support effective solutions? These questions are profoundly difficult to answer… but we think we can. And we do it all the time.
THE PROCESS
Excellence in Giving, LLC has developed a community assessment process that begins with a client’s topic of interest and ends with strategic giving recommendations. The process is captured in the following graphic: