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This is a dramatic declaration on Peter’s part. Peter is the kind of academic who talks about r-squared statistics in blog posts. For him to write that the “untheorized work that comes down to judgment and gut assessment… explains a lot more of the achieved social impact than anyone wants to admit,” is a shot across the bow of the philanthropy industry from someone who should more naturally side with the philanthropic process folks.

Personally, I think Peter is right. It isn’t comfortable to believe that the intangible art of judgment and gut assessment is the most important driver of philanthropic success. It would be far easier if we could all just learn specific, repeatable processes, that while complicated, insured that our giving was effective. But I think the evidence from other fields fully supports the importance of judgment over process.

In investing, Warren Buffett has a process, but it is his intangible gift for spotting value that makes him great. If the reverse was true, then anyone who read the vast literature covering the process that Buffett uses could fully expect to replicate his success.

In writing, novelists around the world study the writing styles of the greats. But The Elements of Style won’t make you Ernest Hemingway.

In economics, thousands of men and women run rigorous studies in an attempt to predict how the economy will behave. Yet we know that this process fails them time and again and fails to even adequately explain historical events.

This is not to suggest that process doesn’t matter. In the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell explains the incredibly important role of judgment and gut assessment in expert decision making. But he does not declare process and rigor is not important. In seems to me that systematic processes are necessary but not sufficient building blocks on which to develop effective philanthropy.

Unless we heed Peter’s warning that “judgment and gut assessment… explains a lot more of the achieved social impact than anyone wants to admit",” all the efforts to build a more effective philanthropy will do nothing more than create elegant mental models that sound great, but fail to make the world a better place.

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My objection to Martin feeling guilty about making a non-optimized charitable donation focused on the need for empathy in philanthropy to not be displaced by logic. But Dan took the argument a step further and argues that ignoring the empathic urge undermines philanthropic effectiveness.

Dan brings up the role of the emerging discipline of behavioral economics in helping us understand how people actually behave rather than how we think they should behave. Behavioral economics is a favorite topic of mine and one that I think can lead to great insights in philanthropy (I’ve just downloaded the eBook Dan points to).

As I work to craft the Tactical Philanthropy track at the Social Capital Markets conference, I want to follow up on the suggestion of Duke University’s Ed Skloot to include a session about what philanthropy can learn from behavioral economics. But I’m at a bit of a loss about how to structure such a panel and focus the conversation.

Do you have any thoughts about how to create a fantastic panel discuss about the intersection of behavioral economics and philanthropy? If so, leave a comment or shoot me an email!

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A Philanthropic Network Passes On Recommendations of Worthy Charities
March 7, 2010 | Chronicle of Philanthropy

In all the talk about measuring results in philanthropy and how best to determine which nonprofit groups are effective, a simple fact is often overlooked. All across the country, foundation program officers, senior nonprofit staff members, and academic researchers know which nonprofit groups are doing great work.

Now a new group called Philanthropedia is working to capture this knowledge about top nonprofit groups and make it available to everyone.

This sort of information, personal recommendations from people in a good position to pass judgment, is a fundamental process that people use to make decisions.

Getting recommendations from experts can mean asking your friend who loves to eat out what she thinks about the new restaurant in town or consulting a book review in The New York Times before choosing your next novel. Recommendations from trusted experts are so valuable that we often pay large amounts of money to gain access to them before making critical investment, legal, or medical decisions.

Philanthropy itself is largely built on recommendations. Studies show that one of the main reasons donors give to certain groups is that a friend asked them to do so.

When those friends are fellow supporters of organizations and not professional fund raisers, they are in effect recommending a group that deserves support. But while those sorts of recommendations motivate action, they are not unbiased or delivered by an expert.

Philanthropedia is working to make expert recommendations of nonprofit groups as accessible as the expert recommendations that help shape our decision making about which movies to see, restaurants to patronize, or retirement strategies to deploy.

Working with a quickly expanding network of experts that includes grant makers, nonprofit staff members, scholars, and other experts, Philanthropedia is making available expert recommendations on topics that include organizations working to curb climate change, improve education, extend small loans to struggling entrepreneurs abroad, and reduce homelessness in the San Francisco Bay area.

Co-founded by Howard Bornstein, a former employee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Deyan Vitanov, an entrepreneur who had previously built an online community for computer programmers, Philanthropedia began operations last year with extensive support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The Philanthropedia team uses a survey methodology similar to one developed by the RAND Corporation to use expert recommendations in situations involving a large degree of uncertainty.

Given the nonprofit world’s current inability to systematically measure the effectiveness of nonprofit programs or even agree on what attributes make for a well-run organization, Philanthropedia’s approach makes a lot of sense.

The big weakness in Philanthropedia’s model is that the recommendations it offers are only as valid as the expertise of the organization’s network.

Because so much of philanthropy is not based on evidence, it is quite possible that the nonprofit groups recommended by the organization’s experts are not truly the most effective ones. It could be that the people in the network have biases that produced flawed ideas about what makes a nonprofit group successful.

However, in a recent background paper, Philanthropedia showed that the nonprofit groups it recommends have little in common based on how much money they raise, how well known they are, and their age, number of employees, and accountability ratings from Charity Navigator.

This means that the experts are picking up on something else. Given that the experts are foundation employees whose job it is to analyze nonprofit groups, researchers who have spent years studying conservation, education, poverty, and other topics, and nonprofit senior staff members who see firsthand the activities of their peers, it seems likely that many of the groups Philanthropedia recommends are among the best.

In the wake of the Haitian earthquake, the Gates foundation, the Ford Foundation, the charity research group GiveWell, the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy, and the nonprofit Acumen Fund all made grants or offered recommendations of which organizations were in the best position to help.

Each of them listed Partners in Health as one of their choices. While this fact does not guarantee that Partners in Health is the most effective nonprofit organization working in Haiti, it does offer a useful piece of information for donors trying to decide what groups to support.

Philanthropedia offers the potential to gather this sort of information for different causes and to offer recommendations that are international, national, or local in scope.

What is fascinating about Philanthropedia is that its process is not only effective but it is also inexpensive to run and easy to expand.

Other organizations working to identify outstanding nonprofit groups by conducting original research may offer some advantages compared with Philanthropedia.

But Philanthropedia’s system allows it to analyze far more nonprofit groups by simply bringing to light what experts already know.

Philanthropedia could quickly become a great way for donors to learn from the people in the best position to know which organizations are the most effective.

Sean Stannard-Stockton is chief executive of Tactical Philanthropy Advisors in Burlingame, Calif., and author of the Tactical Philanthropy blog. He is a regular columnist for The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

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Then social investors came along and decided to change all that. They insisted that their giving was not intended to discharge a moral obligation. Instead, they were making proactive “investments” meant to generate positive “social returns”. These social investors were operating higher up in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as they sought self actualization rather than the more lowly need of being accepted by their community.

But then something strange happened. Social investors began to experience a new kind of guilt. And now, putting the sarcasm aside, we turn to Martin Brookes. Martin is the CEO of New Philanthropy Capital. I admire Martin and his firm very much. But recently, he posted an entry to the New Philanthropy Capital blog that typified the emerging guilt complex of the social investor.

Martin, who has long pointed to fact that donkey sanctuaries in the UK (where he’s based) have long received far more donations than charities that work to end domestic violence, wrote the following:

I’m all for social investing. My take on effective philanthropy, what I call Tactical Philanthropy, makes no mention of making donations to donkey charities to make your child happy. But I think that guilt, whether the traditional guilt that comes from noticing inequity or the neo-guilt of the non-optimized social investor, is one of the worst emotions to drive charitable giving.

Here was my response to Martin:

Martin responded here with a thank you for my compliment to him, but an insistence that he was guilty as charged. What do you think? Was Martin’s support of the donkey sanctuary a betrayal of his social investing ideals or was it a heroic parental act? What role does and should guilt play in philanthropy? As we become more and more aware of the inefficiencies in the charitable sector, what obligation do we have to direct all of our giving towards righting those inefficiencies even if doing so draws us away from the emotions that drive our giving?

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The Institutional Imperative leads to companies making acquisitions of other companies which increase the size of the institution, but do not increase shareholder value. It leads to companies following what other companies are doing so that they do not risk looking bad instead of charting the course that would best lead to enhanced shareholder profits.

In short, the Institutional Imperative describes how many management teams manage their organization for the sake of the organization instead of recognizing that they should be managing their organization for the sake of shareholders.

I believe that many nonprofit organizations are in the grips of a variant of the Institutional Imperative.

The for-profit Institutional Imperative is driven by greed (management teams that want to run bigger organizations) and a desire to not look bad (management teams that follow the herd, even during periods of irrationality such as the dot-com boom and the period leading up to the financial crisis). The nonprofit Institutional Imperative is driven by fear, the fear created by running an organization which is constantly fighting for survival.

Nonprofits, even large ones, rarely have enough money. Even when their revenue is high, they frequently do not have the philanthropic equity on their balance sheet that would give them the ability to invest in the future. When an organization, or an organism, is in survival mode, it must shut down nonessential functions. It must operate so as to preserve itself. In the case of a nonprofit, this means focusing on fundraising and executing existing programs.

The nonprofit Institutional Imperative is responsible for the fact that so few nonprofit measure their performance, track the outcomes of their work or make the resources available to share information about what works (and what does not) with the field.

The nonprofit Institutional Imperative leads nonprofit management teams to run their organization for the sake of the organization rather than for the sake of stakeholders.

Warren Buffett believes that simple human nature is responsible for the Institutional Imperative. Observing that many for-profit and nonprofit organizations fall prey to the Institutional Imperative is not a criticism so much as a recognition that the normal human emotions of greed and fear lead management teams of both for-profits and nonprofits to run their organizations in ways that do not maximize benefits to shareholders and stakeholders.

But great organizations are led by teams who refuse to succumb to the Institutional Imperative. They recognize that the organization they lead is not itself an entity to preserve so much as a vehicle for delivering value to shareholders and stakeholders. The gifted executive is one who realizes that they have been entrusted with stewarding this value creating vehicle. They have been given the responsibility of maximizing the value that their organization creates, not simply tending to the care and feeding of the organization.

Before making every decision an executive team should be able to answer “Yes” to the question, “Does this action enhance value to our shareholders or stakeholders?” NOT “Does this action benefit our organization?”

By throwing off the shackles of the Institutional Imperative, you can align all of your resources towards your true goal. You can do more with less because you are putting every ounce of effort into creating value.

You can truly make a difference.

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Gabi Fitz of IssueLab:

When we forget the original intention behind knowledge production in the social sector (namely that it will contribute to social good and social change) we also forget to dedicate the necessary resources to sharing this knowledge more broadly…

Just like any other social need that is not satisfied by the market (or is maybe even the result of a market failure), the work of making meaning from information, providing effective filters, and brokering knowledge in the social sector is a social service that needs charitable support.

Dan Elitzer of Full Contact Philanthropy:

I agree that unlike in the for-profit sector, information sharing in the nonprofit sector does not have a negative impact on the information-creator’s ability to achieve their goals. However, there is still an opportunity cost for organizations to package their knowledge and transmit it in a form that will reach and be actionable for other actors. Foundations may have the resources to engage in information sharing if they think it will advance their mission, but for most nonprofits, investing the time and financial resources to share their data or knowledge requires making cutbacks in other areas.

If a nonprofit staff member is directed to evaluate a program and capture information on how it can be effectively replicated, the time spent on that task is time not spent on providing direct client services or fund-raising or training new staff, etc. If that staff member then has to find a way to distribute that information so that others in a position to act on it will find it, that’s more time not spent on other mission critical work. Yes, the time spent on capturing and disseminating information may ultimately do more to advance the organization’s mission than whatever other activity was superseded, but unless the organization is confident it can make that case to its supporters, that’s a hard call to make.

These are important points. I think the way to address these concerns is though the Googlization of Philanthropy and the way that technology is unbundling the process of creating information from its distribution. In a Chronicle of Philanthropy column last April I wrote:

The Googlization of philanthropy is about organizing knowledge to allow for smarter giving by more people. Most important, the Googlization of philanthropy means that organizing the information will not be done by the information creators, but by third parties and — excitingly — the people who want to consume that information.

The point here is that we are witnessing the rise of information processing organizations like Google, Yelp and Twitter (when it is used to create information filters) which do not themselves create information, but which pay for the infrastructure of information distribution. Something similar could clearly occur in the nonprofit sector (with current examples like IdeaEncore, PubHub and IssueLab).

The rise of these intermediaries both bring light to the information that is already available and creates incentives for more information sharing. The Foundation Center’s Glass Pockets project is a good example. The site, which shows how transparent and accountable large grantmakers are, both allow users direct click through access to an enormous amount of information about foundations and importantly it helps set expectations around information sharing. Certainly foundations which are currently not sharing information which Glass Pockets deems necessary will at least need to give some thought to changing their policy.

The takeaway from all of this is that it is critical that the social sector, both nonprofits and grantmakers, embrace a cultural ethic of information sharing. That as a sector, we realize that we don’t need to “own” our social impact. If we have valuable information that can help inform the activities of others, it is our duty and our biggest impact opportunity to share this information widely. Even the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest grantmaker in the world, makes up only 1% of the amount given to charity each year. So to the extent that they are able to share what they know to help inform the other 99% of giving, they have an opportunity for the impact from what they know to dwarf the impact from the money they give.

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However, my argument also has echoes of the popular concept among Internet devotees that “Information Wants to be Free.” This concept advances a value judgment that information (especially stuff online) should be free.

I think this concept is nonsense.

The phrase “information wants to be free” comes from a speech given by Stewart Brand (editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, and founder of The Well, Global Business Network and the Long Now Foundation) in 1984. But Brand didn’t simply say that information should be free. What he actually said was:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Brand commented on his speech in a 1987 paper that this tension…

…leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property’, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.

Brands comments reveal a deep complexity that the simplistic insistence that “information wants to be free” ignores. I bring all this up, because I want to be sure that when I advance the idea that philanthropy should embrace rampant information sharing, it is clear that my argument is not based on what I believe is the simplistic moral arguments that information in general wants to be free.

Instead, I’m so excited about advancing information sharing in philanthropy because the tension that Brand points to is mostly a function of for-profit markets and largely absent from social good markets. The reason we have “endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property’, the moral rightness of casual distribution” is because most information generally becomes less valuable to its creator as it spreads.

Coca-Cola is highly secretive of the formula for Coke. If they decided to share the formula, two things would happen 1) Other people would copy Coke, flooding the market with product as good as Coca-Cola’s, drive the price down and make Coke much more widely available and 2) Coca-Cola would find that their business was suddenly far less profitable since they no longer controlled the valuable information that underpins their business.

But the social sector doesn’t face this dilemma. Let’s imagine that a nonprofit existed that ran a program which successfully raised life outcomes of inner city youth. If they decided to share their “formula” two things would happen 1) Other people would copy them, flooding the nation with programs as good as theirs, drive the cost down and make the program much more widely available and 2) Social value creation would skyrocket, the developers of the program would be national heroes and probably win the Nobel Peace Prize (as Muhammad Yunus did in 2006 for advancing the field of microfinance).

Social media and the rise of almost costless information transmission is tearing apart for-profit fields like journalism and the music industry. But philanthropy doesn’t face the tension that Brand describes.

Yet philanthropy is failing to capitalize on the biggest transformational dynamic to hit our field. Brand writes that “each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.” But in philanthropy each round of new devices makes the opportunity better and our failure to capitalize on the shift more dramatic.

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Now, the Skoll Foundation is launching a Social Entrepreneur Search Widget:

The widget can be customized to include all or a selection of funders participating in the API. You can put the widget on your own website if you like by grabbing it here.

The main thing I like about the API and widget is that it surfaces a set of vetted social entrepreneurs. By creating a searchable set of social entrepreneurs that have gone through the due diligence process of well resourced funders, the API makes it easier for individual donors to piggyback on the research of others.

Let’s say that last year a donor read about the nonprofit OneWorld Health’s successful work with pharmaceutical giant Roche to develop a drug for a prevalent, but not profitable, disease. The story is compelling, but the donor wonders if the article is telling the whole story. A quick search of the Social Entrepreneurship API Widget would have revealed that the founder of OneWorld Health passed the due diligence of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs. The info from the Schwab Foundation even includes detailed information about The Innovation, The Strategy and The Entrepreneur (not all funders have added this info to the API). While this doesn’t guarantee a thing, it still puts the donor way ahead of the game in terms of evaluating whether OneWorld Health is worth supporting.

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