You don’t need to come up with hypothetical difficult-to-measure charities. As I’ve noted before, the WIkimedia Foundation is a tricky one. We do want your money, because it takes money to run, but for the current funding drive we’ve actually deliberately chosen a strategy that maximises the number of donors, to protect the projects’ editorial independence (not to be potentially beholden to major donors).
Pretty much all of the valued output (the projects) is not done by the staff, but by volunteers who write stuff and take photos and so forth. This already made our GuideStar rating difficult, for instance.
And how do we measure? What do we choose to measure, knowing that we’ll just get what we measure? Everyone has an opinion on what they want out of Wikipedia, for example, but how do we assess the CEV of our users in a way that we can measure the results of then acting upon and not just get variants on “more of the same please”? At present we’re launching a quite speculative programme to get stuff happening on the wikis in India, for example. It’s a defensibly good idea, but what measurement system would come up with that goal?
There must surely be other extant charities that are quite difficult to quantify results per dollar. jsalvatier suggests open source software projects, for example. Your money is somewhat useful, but your time is far more useful.
You don’t need to come up with hypothetical difficult-to-measure charities. As I’ve noted before, the WIkimedia Foundation is a tricky one. We do want your money, because it takes money to run, but for the current funding drive we’ve actually deliberately chosen a strategy that maximises the number of donors, to protect the projects’ editorial independence (not to be potentially beholden to major donors).
Pretty much all of the valued output (the projects) is not done by the staff, but by volunteers who write stuff and take photos and so forth. This already made our GuideStar rating difficult, for instance.
And how do we measure? What do we choose to measure, knowing that we’ll just get what we measure? Everyone has an opinion on what they want out of Wikipedia, for example, but how do we assess the CEV of our users in a way that we can measure the results of then acting upon and not just get variants on “more of the same please”? At present we’re launching a quite speculative programme to get stuff happening on the wikis in India, for example. It’s a defensibly good idea, but what measurement system would come up with that goal?
There must surely be other extant charities that are quite difficult to quantify results per dollar. jsalvatier suggests open source software projects, for example. Your money is somewhat useful, but your time is far more useful.