Intelligent Philanthropy Blog

How do Family Foundations make giving decisions?

January 5, 2012 01:31 PM by Paul Penley    

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.

Giving poorly can be worse than not giving at all

December 15, 2011 12:41 PM by Paul Penley    

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.  

The Rebirth of Generosity: A response to Leon Neyfakh's Boston Globe article "Why We Give to Charity"

December 8, 2011 07:14 AM by Paul Penley    

When people think more, they are less generous.  How do you feel about that?  Leon Neyfakh promotes this hypothesis in his new Boston Globe article "Why We Give to Charity."  Nonprofit service organizations like Law For Change and Campbell & Company have posted the provocative article for website visitors to read.  It has been swirling around philanthropy-related twitter feeds for all to see.  I bumped into it on a daily news blast from the Chronicle of Philanthropy.  I loved its trend-bucking subversion.  But I found its case truly unconvincing.  So much so, I'm firing back with some neglected facts in the oversimplified case. 

Evaluating Nonprofit Performance: 3 Questions before you start

November 29, 2011 12:10 PM by Paul Penley    

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.

 

A Standardized Approach to Evaluating Nonprofit Performance for Every Giver: An Introduction

November 15, 2011 10:05 AM by Paul Penley    

Endless conversation about "outcomes," "performance," and "impact" needs to come to an end.  It doesn't need to stop.  It needs to get somewhere.  Concrete categories and conclusions need to take shape and either be adopted or discarded.  That is what my next 7 blog posts are all about.  I'm going to lay out a standardized approach to assessing organizational health and performance in the nonprofit sector.  

Before I present the six standards for evaluating nonprofit performance, I've got to be clear about the pros and cons of a standardized approach vs. a customized approach.