October 7, 2008
I just had a very nice meeting with the George McCully and his team over at the Catalog for Philanthropy. Catalogue is a great effort, started in Massachusetts (where they are well-known) but with a desire to be more of a national effort. This is the 11th year for the Catalogue and they have profiled over 900 charities in that time. The result is a very nice printed “catalogue” that gets sent to the top 120,000 households in Massachusetts.
Their core screening qualification is fairly simple. First, your organization must be some form of public benefit that impacts the quality of life in a philanthropic or charitable way. There are over 36,000 nonprofits in Massachusetts, but George only counts 3,000 or so organizations in his “target.” Gone from the list are churches, clubs, dues-paying associations, business groups, sports leagues and other organizations that primarily benefit a specific community. The Catalogue is making no judgment on the value of supporting or joining these organizations, but they don’t meet the test of providing a broad-based public benefit.
If the Massachusetts experience holds nationally, then the “1.4 million registered IRS charities” may be narrowed down to less than 140,000 “Catalogue-worthy” organizations. George also culls organizations that are above $3m in annual revenues, which actually doesn’t impact the number of organizations all that much since most are well under $3m (in the U.S., only 35,000 or so 501c3 organizations exceed $3m revenue out of 1.4m total nonprofits).
So, when people throw around the “1.4 million IRS nonprofits” number, it may be accurate, but it’s not reflective of the real situation. Perhaps at some point Givvy and the Catalogue for Philanthropy can work on creating more of a breakdown that makes it easier for people to find the great local charities that are so easily overlooked when we pull out our checkbooks…
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Giving Patterns, Givving is Broken, Taxonomies | Tagged: catalogue for philanthropy, giving, irs, philanthropy, Taxonomies | 
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Posted by John Treadway
August 29, 2008
Most journeys start with a destination. Some don’t and that can be fun sometimes too, but it can also lead to bad endings (at worst) or a mediocre experience (more common).
Most charitable giving by individuals is a journey with no destination in mind. Or, perhaps an idea of a destination in the back of their mind but no turn-by-turn directions or map to follow. Someone calls – I give. I get a mailing – I give. A co-worker asks me to sponsor their bike ride – I give. I really care about inner city education… but they didn’t call, write or send a friend or colleague after me. Oh well, maybe next year.
How many great local nonprofits are in your community? Don’t know? You’re like most people. So you gave to the public radio station with the huge new edifice on the Mass Pike during their fund drive, but not to the soup kitchen that actually feeds some of your neighbors?
What if you were to sit down and create a plan? One that set goals for the amount, types of charities, regional reach and other factors? Do you think a written plan might help focus your giving to help you get where you want to be?
Start with the destination in mind. You might not get all the way there, but at least you’ll be in the neighborhood…
Sign up for the Givvy Beta and see our easy to use tools for creating a simple but effective giving plan. Today – now.
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Givving is Broken, Taxonomies | Tagged: Better Giving, giving, plan | 
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Posted by John Treadway
July 9, 2008
Seth Godin has a great post from yesterday called “Let me see.“ It’s 18 ideas of how to present data in a way that is more valuable – such as a list of doctors in my down sorted by malpractice rate or car models sorted by crash and repair data (I’d add injuries and fatalities per million passenger miles, etc.).
So, how about let me see…
- charities sorted by those that my family or friends care about
- charities sorted by the ratings and reviews of people I know
- charities sorted by their impact in my own local community
- charities sorted by those that actually perform services vs. those that fund the charities that perform services (e.g. show me Horizons for Homeless Children, not the agencies that fund HHC)
Sound good? I thought so… What do you want to see?
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Giving Patterns, Givving is Broken, Taxonomies | Tagged: seth godin | 
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Posted by John Treadway
May 4, 2008
A while back I was on a call with a guy who used to be part of one of the large donor advised funds. We got onto to a conversation about categorizing your charities and how we were using NTEE (National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities) Codes and IRS Activity Codes to do this. His take? “We asked our customers about this and they told us that they didn’t like our categories – they didn’t match how they viewed the organizations they supported.”
What is wrong with NTEE and IRS Activity Codes? Well, for starters, they may only describe part of what a nonprofit does. Is Horizons for Homeless Children a “Child Day Care” (NTEE Code P33) or an “Advocacy” organization (P01) or is it about Homeless Shelters they work with (L41). In fact it’s all of these. However, if you asked someone who knows the organization to classify the work of HHC, they would probably tell you “services for homeless children” or something similar. And that’s not on the NTEE list at all. Same with the IRS – they have several Activity Codes that relate to the mission of HHC, but nothing described as “services for homeless children.”
Here’s another example – a search of Audubon on Charity Navigator’s web site returns 16 organizations with representation of the following “categories.”
- Environment : Botanical Gardens, Parks, and Nature Centers
- Animals : Zoos and Aquariums
- Environment : Environmental Protection and Conservation
I’m fairly certain that most of these Audubon organizations celebrate, preserve and protect the environment and the birds and other wildlife found there.
So here at Givvy we have taken a different approach. As you can probably guess we favor a more open and flexible approach that gives control to our users, all while preserving the way that charities are classified by these other systems. We can’t wait to show it to you!
Leave a Comment » | Taxonomies | Tagged: actcodes, activity codes, classification, irs, nccs, ntee, tags, taxonomy | Permalink
Posted by John Treadway
November 27, 2007
In reading Peter Frumkin’s book, Strategic Giving: The Art and Science of Philanthropy, there’s a discussion about the difference between a charity and a philanthropy.
Dictionary.com defines charity as “generous actions or donations to aid the poor, ill, or helpless,” and philanthropy as “altruistic concern for human welfare and advancement, usually manifested by donations of money, property, or work to needy persons, by endowment of institutions of learning and hospitals, and by generosity to other socially useful purposes.” Sounds fairly similar to me…
I’m not sure if most people would make the distinction, but a good analogy for Frumkin’s distinction would be treatment vs. cure. A charity gives aid directly to those who need it – it treats the symptoms of a societal ill. A philanthropy seeks to find and affect the underlying causes. Where a charity might feed the homeless, a philanthropy might attempt to uncover the reasons people become homeless in the first place.
It is certain that many nonprofits may engage in both charity and philanthropy – treating the patients of suffering from a disease while funding research to find a cure. At Givvy we are trying to figure out if we should attempt to make the distinction between charity and philanthropy, and whether that would help our members. We expect our members to be smart, but we don’t want to needlessly confuse any of them.
What do you think?
Leave a Comment » | Taxonomies | Tagged: charity, philanthropy | Permalink
Posted by John Treadway
