Which? charities
A bit away from digital, but I’ll follow this up with a digital focused post in a while.
An article in professional fundraising says that intelligent giving has ambitions to turn itself into a Which? for charities. It wants to measure effectiveness – the impact that a charity has – so that it can say which organisation an individual is best investing in.
One of the main ways it proposes to do this is by talking to beneficiaries, as well as experts in the field.
Despite the obvious methodological difficulties of any study, this may be achievable for the UK. But such a system is completely unrealistic for international development.
Is Adam Rothwell really advocating that he will fly around the world, speaking to thousands of beneficaries in hundreds of countries about how charity x or charity y has improved their lives? The time needed to assess an organisation like Oxfam is mind boggling.
Even putting aside the resources required, there are good reasons to suggest a survey wouldn’t be valid, because poverty covers not just material wealth but also social capital. It’s not just a case of counting schools and talking to happy community members – issues are complicated and involve rights and social development with intangible things, like confidence.
In my job I was lucky enough to visit work in Malawi and speak to a community where the charity was phasing out its work after 10 long years. Big changes had been made, a new school, a well, a co-operative for food production. But when I spoke to the community members they were scared. They didn’t want the organisation to leave because they felt they weren’t ready – they had never had to run a community co-operative on their own before, and be truly in charge of their own development. The organisation’s staff were confident that the community could go it alone – like a bird learning to fly they just needed to take the plunge. But to an independent observer, who do you trust in this situation? The community members who are scared, or the organisation’s staff?
Intelligent giving’s aspirations are admirable – trying to see which organisations are effective is really important. But this idea seems pretty half baked to me.
Tags: charity effectiveness, intelligent giving
International development, charity | admin | 
May 20, 2009 10:02 am
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