Accountability in the non-profit world ....

A bit of deviation from my normal Life in NZ blog. Recently became aware of a pretty decent wiki/blog site called Givewell. This came up primarily from an article on the NTEN blog. Weirdly enough, this article is no longer present on the blog. I felt strongly enough to make a small comment on that article.

I have some experience on all sides of the non-profit equation, i.e. employee, funder and fundee. I was an employee of a non-profit (Groundspring.org at that time run by Tides, now part of Network for Good). My two years out there were an eye opening experience and I came away with a sad feeling about how inefficient the whole foundation funding process is and to some extent how big a role "connections" play in funding non-profits. I also concluded that some non-profit organizations are not very efficient, not willing to change and improve their business process and reduce expenses.

We started CiviCRM to provide a good base of open source tools for the non-profit sector. I've been doing this for a little more than two years now, and it has been a pretty good experience. We seem to be filling good niche and are getting used by quite a few orgs in the US and worldwide. You can read more about CiviCRM in our year end report, our website and our blog. We have been reluctant to go down the foundation funding road primarily due to the long road involved but have been lucky enough to have been funded by a good foundation.

We also do some funding in our personal life for a few organizations. Over a period of time, we've started focusing on funding organizations working directly in India. We have experienced quite a few of the things that the Givewell folks mention in their wiki and their blog. Its good to see an organization focus on the non-profit world and publicly analyze and compare them in a transparent manner. There is definitely a need for this, and I hope more foundations do the same and collaborate and publish their findings to improve the sector