Upgrading charity
The Problem
It is challenging to identify good charities to support. The bigger charities typically have slick advertising and marketing campaigns and long lists of potential donors to address, but there is often little transparency into their inner workings, decision processes, and, most importantly, levels of success.1 The smaller charities typically do not have the a broad reach, but also might not have as organized a mechanism for accountability.
In all cases, the key question, when you make a donation, is how much actual good wil come from the donation.
The Goal
This post aims to propose (yet another) mechanism for more objectively assessing the good done by a charitable organization.
The Proposal
Hire “random” people to individually visit and assess their interactions with the given charity. Natural populations for such targets include college students and under employed or unemployed skilled workers (e.g., actors or lawyers). These people would be contractually obligated to secrecy about the nature and output of their task, and, after each interaction, they would complete an open-ended (but standardized) form describing the interaction. The various interactions can be accumulated and summarized for a potential donor.
Variations
Trying to evaluate a synagogue or church? Hire a student to visit the establishment during a number of their activities and report results.
Trying to evaluate a charity that gives out food/money/materials? Hire an actor to attempt to gain support from the charity. To allay ethical concerns, the actor could be chosen to fit the demographic target of the charity, or else the financial equivalent of the support can be donated to the charity at the end of the evaluation.
Trying to assess an educational institution? Hire a young professor (or senior graduate student) to attend classes at the institution and provide feedback on teaching quality, support services, political issues, etc.
Analysis
This is a pretty natural (and simple) idea. Several straightforward challenges arise:
Hiring. Finding people who can competently execute the assessment may be a challenge. It would involve not only identifying a sufficiently large body of potential hires, but also establishing a system for qualifying and training candidates.
Sustainability. This proposal can be made self-sustaining by aggregating results and providing them as more concrete feedback, in the style of Charity Navigator or Charity Watch.
Feedback
(Provide comments and criticisms below)
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This is true even for the major donors to the charity. There is an intrinsic conflict between the charity’s desire to impress its donors and the donors desire to honestly understand the charity’s successes and failures.