Pamela Grow hosted her usual wonderful #smNPchat last Friday. That stands for Small Nonprofit Twitter Chat. The topic was donor accountability, or how can nonprofits be accountable to their donors?
The participants struggled to define "accountability," but the discussion seemed to swirl around the concepts of "transparency" and "impact." Naturally, the recent flap over the 60 Minutes expose of Greg Mortensen, author of Three Cups of Tea, sneaked into the discussion, and quite appropriately since the nonprofit that Mortensen founded may have problems with both transparency and impact.
During the chat, we did seem to agree that nonprofits owe their donors transparency, which is all about making it easy for a donor to look into the organization's finances and management, and what impact the organization is having on the problem it addresses. Donors expect and deserve transparency about the way a charity operates and information about its results.
Transparency means that your nonprofit posts its current 990 (and your most recent audit or financial statement) on your website or links to it on another site, such as GuideStar or Charity Navigator, and that you provide third party endorsements, such as a rating from Charity Navigator, certification from the BBB, and/or reviews from users through Great Nonprofits.
Impact may be a lot harder to demonstrate, depending on what kinds of metrics you gather on your work. You do measure your impact don't you? Yes, great stories are wonderful as is praise from your clients, but those do not free you from providing some statistics as well. Consider this impact page at Camfed, this one from KaBoom which pulls together transparency documents and evidence of impact in one handy place, the Financials page at TrickleUp, and this approach at Food Bank for New York City, with a multitude of links to information about its impact.
One global health organization makes impact an integral part of its marketing. PSI's tag line is "Healthy lives. Measurable results," and its magazine is titled Impact. PSI has a webpage devoted to metrics and research, and its mission statement even includes the word "measurable": " To measurably improve the health of the poor and vulnerable people in the developing world, principally through the social marketing of health products, services and communications." Transparency is covered with a page devoted to the annual report and the 990.
Do you provide transparency on your website, in your publications, and in your fundraising materials? Do you gather metrics on your impact and provide them whenever you communicate with donors? Do you collect stories that flesh out the meaning of those statistics? Do you have third party endorsements from well known rating agencies and umbrella professional organizations to which your nonprofit belongs?
What are your thoughts about transparency and impact? I would love your thoughts and examples.
Here are some resources that participants in the #smNPchat shared:
- Charity Navigator's How Do We Measure Accountability and Transparency?
- NPR's Can You Know Where Charity Dollars Go? Not Easily
- Sea Monkeys and the Case for Tangibility at Katya's Non-Profit Marketing Blog
Related:
- Twitter Chats for Nonprofit Tweeps
- What You Need to Know About Form 990
- Transparency Checklist for Nonprofits
- Attract More Donors by Improving Your Trustworthiness Score
Photo: Win Initiative/Getty Imagesz
Comments
Base on the Three Cups of Team expose and a review of CAI’s website, I’ve concluded that that the definition of transparency needs to be expanded to include consistency between public fillings and marketing materials. CAI’s 990s and most recent audit are on Guidestar and show that they had two programs – building schools and domestic education on the challenges in Pakistan and Afghanistan, with more than 50% of expenses going to the later. But, their annual report and website only speak to building schools. Another case of hiding in plain site?
Very good point, Eileen! That is so true, especially since donors don’t often bother to do the comparison. We all assume if it’s written down, it must be true.
Very interesting examples. Now, if we could just get more nonprofits to understand the need for metrics and get donors to demand them, we’d be well on our way to solving the problem. Thanks for this roundup of information.
The nonprofit for which I work raises funds selling sponsorship of special events. Sponsors are happy for the high profile media exposure but in the past, some left us saying we were successful and therefore did not need their further participation. This is partly because some companies still see sponsorship as “helping out”. But more importantly, when media and second hand information shape sponsors’ opinion; when there is insufficient transparency, sponsors, donors etc often move their money elsewhere.