A Zagat’s for Charities

A new online venue allows charity clients, volunteers, and others to post guidebook-style ‘reviews’

When people ask Perla Ni how her new Web site, Great Nonprofits, helps people judge the quality of charities, Ms. Ni turns the question around on them.

“When’s the last time you bought a book from Amazon and didn’t read the customer reviews?’” she asks.

“This site provides that: peer reviews, from honest people, about whether [the charities] are making an impact.”

On her Web site, people who receive help from a charity or who volunteer for one can log on and rate their experience on a scale of one to five stars. People can also add comments: praise, suggestions, or criticism about what the charity does well or needs to improve. And if reviewers can’t think of what to say, the site offers fill-in-the-blank prompts like, “If this organization had 10-million bucks it could ____ .”

Ms. Ni, the site’s founder and chief executive, likens the site to a Zagat restaurant guide, something to help the public decide if a charity is worth donating to or asking for help, just as Zagat helps determine if an Italian restaurant is worth driving across town for. And like the Zagat guides, Great Nonprofits tailors its services to each city. After months of testing, sites for Pittsburgh and San Francisco have opened in the past few weeks, and Ms. Ni expects to expand to other cities soon.

Volunteers’ Views

Beyond its possible benefits to the public, the site offers services for charities, too, like feedback on their operations. The Human Services Center Corporation, which coordinates social-service agencies in and around Pittsburgh, has received 42 of the 300-plus total reviews so far, more than any other group. The feedback, which came mostly from volunteers that the center asked to contribute, has pleased David A. Coplan, executive director of the center, and he hopes to take advantage of the positive comments: “We think this will generate additional volunteers for the work we’re doing.”

However, the site’s unrelenting positivity has worried critics. In theory, it bypasses the filter of nonprofit groups, relying instead on the testimony of people affected by charities. But volunteer opinions are not always neutral. Although supportive of the site, Peter Frumkin, a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, worries that it represents “a Lake Wobegon version of philanthropy,” he says, “where every charity gets four stars.”

In addition to feedback, Great Nonprofits, which raises most of its $180,000 annual budget from individuals and foundations, provides groups with a low-cost way to put up a relatively sophisticated Web site, including pictures and videos. Mr. Coplan’s group has just seven full-time employees and no dedicated technology staff members. But Great Nonprofits “provides a vehicle for a lot of organizations who might not have these capabilities,” Mr. Coplan says.

The site also lets charities post classified ads and highlights news stories about small organizations — an important service, Ms. Ni says, to remind people of the positive work most local groups do. Given all the functions available, Ms. Ni eventually hopes each city’s site will be an omnibus guide for its small nonprofit groups.

Finding Successes

The idea for Great Nonprofits sprang after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. At the time, Ms. Ni was publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, a journal about nonprofit ideas and trends. The editors wanted to know which local charities had done good relief work. But despite being insiders in the nonprofit world, they had a difficult time figuring that out.

So they flew David Weir, then the managing editor, to Biloxi, Miss., to walk the streets and talk to victims. Only then, with comments from local residents about people’s experiences, could the Stanford journal’s staff members sort out which groups were succeeding and why.

Ms. Ni realized many cities would benefit if people knew more information about local groups, and she knew there was a market for it. As publisher of the Review, she received innumerable pitches on how to evaluate charities, she says, “because that’s a question at the heart of every donor: How can I trust you with my money and my time?”

Some evaluation efforts already exist, of course. But most rely on statistics, usually financial data, taken from the Form 990 tax form that organizations file with the Internal Revenue Service. And those data rarely provide a full picture of a charity, says Mr. Frumkin, the Texas professor. Great Nonprofits, he says, “represents a terrific attempt to deal with the inadequacy of purely financial measures of charities,” measures he calls “absurdly narrow.”

At first Ms. Ni planned to focus on the San Francisco area, where she lives. But the president of the Forbes Funds approached her after a presentation in the spring of 2006 and pitched her on the idea of including Pittsburgh in her testing phase, since he felt the cities’ nonprofit scenes were alike.

Both cities have many charities, but few with a national reach, says Vivien Y. Luk, a top official at the Forbes Funds, an organization that helps charities improve their management. Most of those charities focus on small-scale projects that receive little attention. Donors and volunteers, therefore, need the equivalent of someone walking Biloxi and recording people’s comments to tell them how well those charities work.

In addition, without national fund-raising arms, those local charities have minuscule budgets. Ms. Luk also helps run the Greater Pittsburgh Nonprofit Partnership, which put up $30,000 to help Great Nonprofits get started, including subsidies for the small fee charities pay to participate. Ms. Luk says nearly three-quarters of the partnership’s 300-odd members operate on less than $500,000 annually. That leaves little money for promotion or recruitment. So, just as MySpace lets regular Joes and Janes run their own sites, Ms. Ni wanted to give small charities the chance to get their messages out and distinguish themselves from dozens of similar-sounding groups.

Laptop Computers

One of the first groups to receive feedback when Great Nonprofits began testing last summer was the social-services agency SF Connect. Dariush S. Kayhan, its executive director, says he has been impressed with the 20 testimonials about his group so far.

In June, SF Connect sponsored an event where homeless people could visit doctors and dentists to get free treatment for lingering problems, like lice or cavities. To gauge how well the event worked, Great Nonprofits employees showed up with laptop computers and posted reactions and suggestions from a dozen homeless people after they received treatment.

One man suggested SF Connect could draw more people by holding the event elsewhere, because he felt people were scared to travel to the neighborhood where it was held. Others wanted clearer directions about where medical tents or clothing booths were located. Over all, the comments suggested it was a successful outing.

Great Nonprofits has tried to reach other charity recipients in similar ways, but has struggled. After officials of Great Nonprofits showed up at an event in Pittsburgh to honor people who volunteered as mentors to children, employees had trouble finding an Internet connection, then had difficulty persuading participants to visit their table. The site ended up with few comments. And even when everything works smoothly, Ms. Ni says, sending people to events is labor-intensive and a strain on her staff of five people.

‘Definitely a Worry’

Most of the reviews the site has posted so far have been positive — a relief to people like Mr. Kayhan, who had worried about negative responses. When he first heard the site would allow anyone to comment on a nonprofit group’s work, he remembers thinking, “Oh, gosh. On the Internet, there’s all that run-amok-type stuff.”

Indeed, Ms. Luk, of the Pittsburgh partnership, says negative reviews are “definitely a worry that each organization has brought up.” Someone involved with local nonprofit groups moderates the site for flagrant or irrelevant postings, but as with most online forums, no one edits comments before they get posted. However, Ms. Luk points out an upside to a few barbed comments. No organization is perfect, she says, and “a negative review actually gives an organization more credibility, because it means you have honest criticism on your site.”

In fact, if anything detracts from the usefulness of the site so far, it is the surfeit of positive reviews. The Human Services Center in Pittsburgh — which e-mailed former volunteers and interns to post reviews — has received no rating lower than four stars (and just three of those) amid dozens of perfect scores. Great Nonprofits does try to solicit some constructive criticism with feedback prompts like, “Ways to make it better.” But so far, even the very lowest-ranked charities on the site still earned three stars each.

Among all those glittering reviews, it becomes difficult to distinguish which groups work. Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, a watchdog group, notes that even the site’s name betrays a bias toward positivity. “I’d be just as interested in a site called Awful Nonprofits,” he says. He adds that he wants to see more emphasis on whistle-blowing, “but nonprofits aren’t going to want to be listed if they feel there are going to be serious criticisms against them.”

Still, Ms. Ni says the open-ended feedback should provide a supplement to other rating systems for now. And as word about the site spreads through Internet ads, direct-mail campaigns, and word of mouth, more lukewarm and possibly even severe reviews should help sift out good groups from less-effective ones.

“This is going to be a long process,” she says. “It takes time to build people’s awareness of this, especially in the nonprofit sector, where you’re serving people that are hard to reach.”