This week I spent some time completing the CN 2.0 evaluations of the two charities to which I have been assigned. After going through the evaluation process for two very different charities, I am sure many of us have questions and comments. For myself, I was perplexed by some of the sub-questions for question 7: Does the charity adjust and improve in light of its results?
In general, this specific question I think says a lot about a charity. First, it implies that the charity has taken some kind of action to figure out what its results are, through feedback, research, or other outcome-based initiatives. Also, as many of you have experienced, I have learned that managing a nonprofit isn't about knowing everything and doing everything perfectly, but about learning to make changes in order to improve overall effectiveness.
Despite my "warm fuzzy" feelings toward the general question about adjusting and improving in light of results, I thought some of the CN subquestions related were not really answering this question. For example, questions 7.2, 7.3, & 7.4 ask about a charity admiting mistakes and publicizing corrective action. I did not find anything of this sort on either website I looked at, and thus had to give a "no" for those questions. I am figuring that this will lower the charity's overall score, but I am not convinced this is a fair approach; it implies that charities have mistakes to publicize. While I am sure organizations make mistakes, I think the response is not necessarily an admittance of wrongdoing, as if the organizational leader had known they were not taking the best approach and purposefully made decisions which had a negative impact. Rather, I think it is the committment to regularly evaluating the work of the nonprofit and improving which should be scored on the CN tool.
Have others had similar reactions to the "mistakes" questions? Did anyone find a charity that does "admit mistakes"?
Kristen,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about those questions. I think that an organization will only feel the need to publicize their mistakes if they have been publicly criticized or have received some sort of sanction for their wrongdoing-- or if they have done something at this level but have not been found out yet. While I do think it is important for an organization to admit their major mistakes and to show how they are making amends, a lot of their small mistakes are quietly and effectively resolved, and I don't think these should necessarily be publicized. Also, we shouldn't be rewarding an organization for making these major mistakes that worthy of publicizing over organizations who aren't making those mistakes to begin with.
I like your idea about addressing whether organizations are improving based on previous their results-- that would tell a lot more about an organization's effectiveness.
This is definitely the same problem for me as well. When I was filling the “Results” catalogue, I found much information that CN asked are not provided by the organization that I evaluated. I have to give the organization many “No”s since I cannot access to the information that CN wanted. However, based on the information in their website, for me, it seems that the organization is doing a pretty good and innovative job. If I had a chance to evaluate the performance of the organization, I would give it a quite different result without considering the standards that CN provides. I think the catalogue “feedback” is a good idea for raters to comment the pros and cons of the rating system, and I also think that it might be a good idea for CN to have a place for raters to write the information that they think are important but are not able to fit in anywhere.
ReplyDeleteKristen,
ReplyDeleteI had the exact same situation with my two charities. Although one of mine will have a much better score than the other, even the good one had no's for this section. I find it hard for charities to have the capacity to live up to these kinds of standards. I also know as a donor, none of those would matter to me, but I'm not an expert in this field so what do I know?
I wonder whether you might find it useful if a nonprofit organization had a section called "what we've learned," or something like that? For me, the value of identifying mistakes is discussing how an organization evolves or develops. I agree with Hayley that small mistakes may not warrant publicity, but it may be useful for an organization's leaders to engage in a dialogue with constituents about what they are learning. Learning, to me, is the point of the this question on the CN app. I also see a connection between this issue and the discussion of transparency and conversation in the Kanter and Fine book.
ReplyDelete