April 23, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
Gara LaMarche, president of the Atlantic Philanthropies, is offering advice to donors about how to evaluate their philanthropy.
In an opinion article in The Financial Times, Mr. LaMarche sets out guidelines for measuring charitable work.
Among his pieces of advice:
- Evaluation costs money, and donors should support charities’ efforts to examine their work.
- Avoid the evaluation “obsession” that some grant makers have embraced. “Data should never be collected for the sake of it,” he writes.
- Measurement efforts should be a learning tool for the beneficiary and the donor, “not a stick with which to beat grantees.”
“Donors successful in business want answers about impact, and while traditional philanthropy needs to help them understand the ways in which social initiatives are often quite different from profit-making ventures, it needs to be responsive to these legitimate concerns,” he writes.
What do you think of Mr. LaMarche’s advice? What suggestions would you add?
