Passion and Data Aren’t Incompatible in Making Giving Decisions

To the Editor:

The Hewlett Foundation’s Effective Philanthropy Group recently announced a thoughtful evolution of its grant-making strategy. Unfortunately, The Chronicle’s article on this announcement failed to capture all of the relevant facts of the shift or its broader implications.

More generally, the article revealed a set of five misconceptions about effective philanthropy.

First, the article implies that there is only limited demand for good information about nonprofits. The facts show otherwise.

Last year, GuideStar had 6.7 million unique users on our website and, in addition, our data was used 22.4 million times on other platforms. Our colleague organizations—the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, Charity Navigator, GiveWell, and others—have an aggregate user base well over 10 million. And even these large numbers vastly underestimate the total use of information about nonprofits.

Second, there is a misconception that donors do not want information about effectiveness in particular. Indeed, the Hope Consulting Money for Good II research—which used sophisticated survey techniques with a set of more than 6,000 people—found that 71 percent of individual donors, 68 percent of advisers, and 90 percent of foundation staff want information about nonprofit effectiveness. With each group, effectiveness was the first- or second-most desired category of information.

Third, there is a strange belief that the only users of good data about nonprofits are individual donors themselves.

To the contrary, perhaps the most important consumers of high-quality nonprofit information are other nonprofits. In addition, consider all of the other stakeholders of social change who want information about nonprofits: beneficiaries, volunteers, researchers, journalists, and government officials.

Our broader challenge—and one the Hewlett Foundation is still engaged in—is to build a system of transparency and information flow for multiple stakeholders, not just for individual donors.

Fourth, the article framed effective philanthropy as an impatient approach to social change. Anyone who has worked to build a better world knows that change takes time.

Effective philanthropy does call for tracking progress in the short- and medium-term. But near-term metrics exist to inform the evolution of a longer-term strategy. Indeed, effective philanthropy’s attention to metrics is the opposite of short-termism: It is an attempt to prepare philanthropy for the long haul.

Fifth, and most tragically, this article reinforced the false notion that passion and data are somehow incompatible, that donors are either emotional or rational. We all know this is not true.

As humans, we constantly bring passion together with reason—whether choosing a house to buy or filling out a bracket for March Madness. Indeed, this intersection of heart and mind is what makes us human. The nonprofit sector is fully capable of both passion and reason—and we need both if we are going to tackle the great challenges of our time.

The nonprofit sector is a critical part of our society. We can and must expect a lot from ourselves and from our partners. We are not stuck in the past. As a field, we can evolve and learn. And our pursuit of philanthropy with a purpose can—and must—involve all sides of the human experience.

Jacob Harold
Chief Executive
GuideStar
Washington