Our goal is helping more philanthropic dollars flow to incredible social impact organizations that actually change lives. This requires being able to tell which ones do. That is harder than it sounds, and over the past several months we enhanced the standards and tools we use to do that.
We start with the specific harms a social problem causes and ask these three questions:
Does the organization measure intermediate outcomes, or only what it does, such as providing training, books, meals, and medicine?Intermediate outcomes are changes in what a person did or has: a new job, increased income, school enrollment, or a place to live. They expand what an individual or family can do.
Does the organization measure the ultimate outcomes of what their intervention produces: health, mental wellbeing, close relationships, autonomy, safety, meaning, personal growth, and hope.
Most organizations report what they do. Fewer measure either outcome. And, almost none ask what would have happened to the same people without their intervention. This is the counterfactual impact we are looking for.
We've also tightened what counts as evidence. A moving story isn't a result. We read the annual reports, the audited financials, the PDFs buried three clicks deep, the independent evaluations, and the studies an organization publishes that make it look bad, which are often the most revealing things on a website.
Then, we re-scored every organization we had previously reviewed from scratch. Not spot-checked. Re-run against the new standard.
What's Coming
Impact Market is our new public home for certified organization reviews. More than thirty reviews are in final edit and will publish to ImpactMarket.org over the next few months. They range from local service providers to global health and water organizations. We'll send them about two times a week or as a weekly digest if there are more. The Impact Market will be a great place to find exceptional organizations for your year-end giving.
More than 1,000 additional organizations are in research, so that directory will keep growing. More on that pipeline in a future post. We primarily review organizations that you suggest, so keep sending us organizations that you think are best in class.
How Else We Can Help
Philanthropic Consulting. We advise families, foundations, corporations, and institutional funders on giving and impact investing strategy, and we review organizations on their behalf. More here.
Impact Investing. We help donor-investors participate in diversified impact funds built around our certified organizations. More here.
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