"Donation Dashboard" helps donors find charities

This is pretty cool: the Donation Dashboard, a site created by the Berkeley Center for New Media. It's meant to help you decide where you should direct your charitable giving.

It works like this: You are offered a series of descriptions of nonprofit organizations. You rate them on a sliding scale of your interest. Then it returns a pie chart of how you should divide up your charitable giving.

The logic is, "If you like organization X, you might also like organization Y." In my case, I got a few "what the heck?" recommendations, but as I understand it, the relationships between X and Y should improve as more people make ratings.

You can check out my portfolio here. I rated a lot more than the 15 that they start you with. The organizations that rose through the clutter are mainly ones I already give to. Not surprising, I guess.

I have two criticisms of this dashboard:

• Why organizations? Most people give to causes, finding organizations that match up with the causes they care about, not the other way around. In fact, in many cases, the small amount of information you get about an organization hardly tells you what the cause really is.
  
• Focus on efficiency rating. Each organization's "efficiency rating" is prominently displayed. That's unfortunate, because it has the appearance of being a meaningful quantifiable indicator of some kind of quality. Which it isn't. They should either remove it, de-emphasize it, or give a richer menu of information that gives a better picture of an organization.
  

When it actually links to an online giving mechanism, it'll really be slick.

But really, this is pretty spiffy, and is well on the way to give donors more power than ever. It will be up to us to work with tools like these in the coming years.

Other posts about the Donation Dashboard are at Prospecting and Tactical Philanthropy.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, nptech

Comments

[Sonia]

Great point about cause vs. organization focus! As I go through the filter myself, I'm seeing organizations that I'm not fond of, but who work on causes I do support. This organization-based approach has major potential to skew results. Maybe they could take a page out of Pandora's book - potential donors can enter the name of an organization they already support, then based on the org's profile it can suggest some?

[Ted Grigg]

When I look at rating systems, I ask myself how the effort is funded. Here is what the rating organization says in its "About" page.

"The Donation Dashboard website is a pilot system that includes information on 70 non-profit institutions. If the system is successful, the developers hope to expand it with other features and partner with a third party that can streamline collecting and distributing funds."

Further on, the website states that this is a research project.

As the program matures, the "third party" will need to make money off of this effort.

If funded by the organizations, then there is the ongoing pressure to recommend those that support them financially and minimize the non participating non profits.

The only way to retain an objective rating structure is to have the users pay a small fee for the service. And that model probably will not work. The selling challenge may be too great.

So I wander how long this product will last.

One might look to Consumer Reports as the better model. But again, do the raters really know what they are doing?

As always, the devil is in the details even when the idea has great potential.

Thanks for another informative blog.

Ted

[Ryan Scott]

This could be really interesting as a feature on another site, but surely its not a standalone product.

And definitely should be broken down based on cause, or at least take cause into account. I get the impression the algorithm just does 'you like x and y and bob like y and z, so you might like z'.

[Barbara Clarke]

I was kind of surprised at how the dashboard didn't learn as it went along, and I think this relates to the causes vs organization issue. I rated a bunch of programs, and kept rating programs to do with animals as "not interested" (sorry folks) and every new portfolio I got had some sort of animal organization. The Pandora suggestion is a good one. Also, local vs domestic vs global is another way people decide.