What ever happened to the charity of yesterday?
December 16, 2015 8:45 PM   Subscribe

How AT&T Execs took over the Red Cross and Hurt its Ability to Help People.

The past two times the American Red Cross has shown up on the Blue, it has been because of major foul ups first in Haiti, then in New York/New Jersey. ProPublica and NPR dive into the upper management of the American Red Cross and uncover how a takeover by former corporate executives has gutted the charity's ability to respond and help those in crisis.
posted by Hactar (49 comments total) 40 users marked this as a favorite
 
I didn't include it in the post, but herrdoktor's comment in the American Red Cross Hurricane Sandy thread is worth reading for an on-the ground view. The presence of Bill and his ilk also encourages the idea of getting rid of certain long term volunteers, however, it seems that in an attempt to do this sort of thing, they also removed money from the hands of those who were in disasters.
posted by Hactar at 8:49 PM on December 16, 2015 [8 favorites]


Back in 2001, there was a fire at my little apartment complex and two apartments were entirely ruined by the fire and the water damage. Both those people were given beds and enough money to restock their lives (basic household stuff, clothing) and although enough to survive on for a month or two while they reassembled their lives. I really loved the Red Cross at that point.

The past 14 years, the more I read about them, the less I like or even trust them. We need a strong list of alternate charities who are filling the gaps to donate to. Sadly, it will likely be largely regional or even local charities, so giving will be more complicated.

I love ProPublica's reporting, but it's always so grrr and depressing. Glad to have read this, though.
posted by hippybear at 9:10 PM on December 16, 2015 [8 favorites]


A couple of alternative charities that actually work:

Direct Relief

Doctors Without Borders

CharityNavigator.org gives good reviews of all kinds of charities, good and bad.
posted by blob at 9:11 PM on December 16, 2015 [19 favorites]


Good grief. I am so conflicted about this. I have based my monthly support cheques on Charity Navigator scores, and other research after that whole Give Well™ debacle. Due to some unpredictable and unfortunate circumstances, I am going to have to cut back on these contributions in the new year. I guess I'll just scratch the Red Cross off the list altogether then, which means that I'll be able to reduce my other monthly stipends by a lesser amount.

It still sucks.
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 9:51 PM on December 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


After Elizabeth Dole used the ARC as a platform to pander to redneck Christian voters, to further her political career, I vowed never to give to the ARC ever again, and that was after I vowed never to give blood given their already rampant homophobic agenda. It's a damn shame a formerly important and useful charity has become a rest stop for right-wing politicians and corporate officials, but those of us in one minority or another have known about the Red Cross's reputation for decades.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 9:59 PM on December 16, 2015 [19 favorites]


“We thought if we raised prices, American Heart [Association] would probably raise prices, and life would be good,” McGovern said at a 2013 employee town hall meeting, referring to the Red Cross’ competitor in the CPR class business. “Didn’t happen.”
Their entire strategy to raise money was to hope that their price increase could signal other providers to also raise prices? They were trying to run a CPR class cartel?!?!
posted by BungaDunga at 10:03 PM on December 16, 2015 [95 favorites]


To be clear, this is about the American Red Cross, right? Is the International Committee of the Red Cross still a good place to donate?
posted by col_pogo at 10:19 PM on December 16, 2015 [3 favorites]


Run it like a business! Gut the core functions, pay the executives bonuses, and leave someone else with the mess. Works every time.
posted by Arbac at 10:30 PM on December 16, 2015 [69 favorites]


The whole thing is upsetting. It's really a shame.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 11:16 PM on December 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


Run it like a business!

When will the idea that this is the way everything should work die out? Or the weird misconception that business are inherently efficient? Because that’s when things will start getting better.
posted by bongo_x at 11:26 PM on December 16, 2015 [23 favorites]


Arbac hits the nail on the head. "Run it like a business" should always be interpreted as "make sure somebody makes a shit ton of money while everyone else suffers."
posted by Joey Michaels at 11:41 PM on December 16, 2015 [33 favorites]


col_pogo: the national Red Cross organizations are all independently operated. The Canadian Red Cross, for example, was initially founded as a branch of the British RC and doesn't share the management structure of the American RC.
posted by sudasana at 11:48 PM on December 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


PareidoliaticBoy, I totally missed the GiveWell bullshit the first time it rolled around. Now it's 4:30 and I've been reading about charities for 4 hours. Thank you, but at the same time, damn it, I'm sick, I should be sleeping.
posted by Hactar at 1:37 AM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]


No complaints about them collecting and selling body parts, I see...
posted by mikelieman at 1:56 AM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]


It's very easy to focus on the negative, a laziness the left seems especially prone to. Such a grim business, eliminating everything that isn't perfect. It seems perfection is achieved not by what you do but what you don't do.

I will continue using GiveWell, because they are doing something no one else is, and it directly addresses this laziness. (Suggestions welcome.)
posted by pfh at 2:05 AM on December 17, 2015


Depressingly related
posted by tyndyll at 2:15 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


Wait, what is GiveWell doing that no one else is? I've never quite being able to figure that out.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 2:22 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


“We thought if we raised prices, American Heart [Association] would probably raise prices, and life would be good,” McGovern said at a 2013 employee town hall meeting, referring to the Red Cross’ competitor in the CPR class business. “Didn’t happen.”

I puzzled over this for a bit, because it's fucking insane.

Then I remembered: they are all AT&T execs. They truly believe that they have an unassailable physical monopoly. They're not running the Red Cross like a business. They're trying to run it like a telco monopoly.

Wow.

At least there's a simple solution. Fire them all and start again.
posted by Combat Wombat at 2:32 AM on December 17, 2015 [13 favorites]


When will the idea that this is the way everything should work die out? Or the weird misconception that business are inherently efficient?

It's a very weird idea. The last two decades have shown pretty well that running a business like a business is not a key to success, even for most businesses. They are addicted to the boom and bust cycle, short term planning, and arbitrary and often ill-formed metrics. Having failed at their own task, "business methods" need to colonize other systems of organizations driven by a grotesque sunk loss fallacy. Maybe we should try running businesses like charities, instead, and see what happens. The current experiment is pretty clearly negative....
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:38 AM on December 17, 2015 [30 favorites]


"Run it like a business" should always be interpreted as "make sure somebody makes a shit ton of money while everyone else suffers."

"Run it like a business" is inherently inefficient. Business requires profit, which is a wasteful assignation of resources that running something like a charity, or public body, or anything but a damn business does not require. Whatever a business can do, you can do it better by doing literally the exact same thing, but without siphoning off money. Profit is a structural inefficiency inherent to business.
posted by Dysk at 2:53 AM on December 17, 2015 [75 favorites]


This really hits home for me. My mother worked for the local Red Cross chapter for twenty-five years, running their blood program and she and her co-workers would have hated this. They were exactly the fussy Red Cross ladies that you would have expected them to be but when there was a disaster, they were right there working tirelessly to get the victims shelter and supplies. Mom was an old-school socialist and she would have been livid about this. She hated, hated Liddy Dole and this would have sent her right over the top.
posted by octothorpe at 4:16 AM on December 17, 2015 [17 favorites]


I've linked it in previous threads, but this 1999 WaPo article about Elizabeth Dole's tenure at the top describes many of the same image-over-substance and centralized control problems. The upper management of the Red Cross has been fucked for decades now.
posted by mediareport at 4:19 AM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]


When will the idea that this is the way everything should work die out?

When all you have is a hammer MBA, everything looks like a nail business.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:34 AM on December 17, 2015 [35 favorites]


"The grift is strong with this one."
posted by ccaajj aka chrispy at 4:36 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


I had a contracting gig at the Red Cross a few years ago. Lasted a year. Database programming. I only have that small, narrow view of the organization. But it looked hopelessly outdated, antiquated, and poorly run at all levels. I don't begrudge anyone thinking a turnaround effort was needed, or trying the old "run it like a business" solution. But clearly it hasn't worked and something new needs to happen here.
posted by ish__ at 5:11 AM on December 17, 2015


If only there were some other national organization with the ability to raise money from everyone, and whose goal was not to be run like a business and generate profits, but to promote the general welfare. I guess that's just too liberal in this day and age.
posted by TedW at 5:34 AM on December 17, 2015 [30 favorites]


Profit is a structural inefficiency inherent to business.

Hell yes. It's especially galling when people want government to be run like a business. A government makes a "profit" by collecting more in taxes than it spends on services. If you run a country like a business, you want to increase taxes as much as possible and cut every service you can - pretty much the exact opposite of what every citizen wants from their country.
posted by GhostintheMachine at 5:36 AM on December 17, 2015 [13 favorites]


ish__: "I had a contracting gig at the Red Cross a few years ago. Lasted a year. Database programming. I only have that small, narrow view of the organization. But it looked hopelessly outdated, antiquated, and poorly run at all levels. I don't begrudge anyone thinking a turnaround effort was needed, or trying the old "run it like a business" solution. But clearly it hasn't worked and something new needs to happen here."

I don't doubt that they needed some serious modernization, when my mom retired in the late nineties they were really just starting to computerize the offices, but you can update systems without losing sight of the actually mandate of the organization.
posted by octothorpe at 5:40 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


Their entire strategy to raise money was to hope that their price increase could signal other providers to also raise prices? They were trying to run a CPR class cartel?!?!

This may have been my biggest WTF moment in the whole piece, because it reveals their profound, staggering misunderstanding of what a not-for-profit organization is. It shows a complete lack of interest in, or understanding of, nonprofit finance and management. It completely disregards what it means to be mission-driven and how making decisions on a mission basis impacts financial planning.

Because of the nondistribution constraint, revenue-generating enterprises (like the ARC's CPR classes) are compiled with other sources of funds and run on a break-even basis with the current goals of the wider service operation (basically, to a balanced budget that is capable of delivering the service specified in the mission). For that reason, rationales for the pricing and growth of individual programs occur within a larger analysis of the organization's needs to deliver its core service; sure, you might legitimately want to use your CPR business as a 'cash cow' revenue stream to fund other operations. But the central, disastrous mistake here is not understanding the NFP space and not understanding that each organization's internal funding mix is unique and each has its own set of strategic priorities and a distinct core mission - which generates high variability in decisionmaking, which is exactly the point of having a nonprofit structure in the first place, to allow variations in organizational type and purpose that could not be delivered by either the marketplace or the public sector. So, when you invest in, price, and offer a revenue-generating enterprise, you do it relative to your own organizations' operating needs and financial plan, and not with the assumption that every other organization operating in that space has a similar funding mix and priority set and is going to behave exactly like you are. I mean, because it's also a mission-driven organization that is trying to reduce death and sickness from heart disease, the AHA's particular mix may place a much higher premium on offering CPR as a public service, and thus be willing and able to subsidize it, keeping prices lower and accessible, rather than milk it as a revenue stream as the ARC decided it needed to do. There is no reason to assume that another nonprofit is going to make the same business calculus as you, because you are not privy to their internal decisionmaking, and because at its most basic, charitable operations are not a widgets in/widgets out marketplace. That is blindingly obvious on its face, and yet completely evaded the ARC's best-and-brightest.

Nonprofits, in truth, are more complex than for-profit businesses (even if their overall capitalization is much lower and so there are fewer ancillary financial services glommed around them to skim off them), and that's why it is, 100% of the time, a mistake to think that strategies from the world of for-profit business can map easily and perfectly onto organizations that involve many more types and tiers of revenue and employee and service structures than your average widget factory. There is a sophisticated body of nonprofit financial theory that is growing all the time, but these people obviously never cracked any of those books, or even listened to their own experienced employees. It'd be shocking if I weren't already so jaded, but boards really seem to fall for this "business expertise" BS, partly because they themselves lack the financial education to evaluate the unique metrics and viable strategies of NFPs.
posted by Miko at 6:05 AM on December 17, 2015 [55 favorites]


I find it to be an interesting coincidence that I'm having a hard time loading this article over my AT&T internet connection.
posted by jferg at 6:19 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


This change in the ARC is not as quick as indicated by the article. My uncle works in a hospital blood bank. He was telling me not to donate blood to the Red Cross all the way back in the early 90s (in fact, got quite angry at me for it) because the Red Cross made such a profit off the blood and treated hospital blood banks so badly during crises. In that light, none of this is shocking.
posted by rednikki at 7:06 AM on December 17, 2015


I don't understand the drive towards centralization and the closing of local chapters. Obviously for some things there are economies of scale, but for an organization whose day to day work is local, breaking those ties seems crazy. The central organization should provide coordination for large scale responses, systems and resources and distribution for local chapters, but it should also be encouraging and cultivating local chapters to forge strong community relationships.
posted by Nothing at 7:28 AM on December 17, 2015 [6 favorites]


Blood collection was a revenue center for them that they used to fund disaster aid. Though that's not what we're exactly thinking when we "donate" blood - it's really donating a resource that can be exchanged for cash, and in that way is a "donation" - I think it's a reasonably legitimate way to raise funds and do some good at the same time. I also can't really cry much for for-profit hospitals, because the price of blood is about the least of our worries as far as how they're bilking the public with extortionary pricing. I can't speak to how they treated hospitals. But I've been off the Red Cross myself since 9/11, when corruption was rampant and accounting practices abysmal.
posted by Miko at 7:29 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


Here's what givewell does poorly -- they coddle the people who give reasons for not giving to charity that they only want to give to 'the best' charity, or only to the most impactful, and the only reason they aren't giving now is it's impossible to tell which is the best. that only if we implied an empirical mind to it, we can find the one true charity, and hold on to your money until then. Everyone else in non-profits doesn't know what they're doing, until now.

Why do I need maximum utility for my charity dollar? why pretend that the donor's personal morals and biases shouldn't have any impact on how they give?
posted by garlic at 7:30 AM on December 17, 2015 [7 favorites]


Many of the people who get worked up about effective altruism believe that giving to anything but the most effective charity is morally very similar to manslaughter.
posted by vogon_poet at 7:34 AM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]


What GiveWell does is for an extremely marginal (in numerical terms) audience. It's basically a charitable investor's club. Despite the rhetoric, its work has not proved to be field-changing, but they've found a niche for self-sustainability among a certain kind of donor.
posted by Miko at 7:55 AM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]


Eh. GiveWell is an option if you are short on time to research a charity and want to pick something in twenty minutes once a year to donate to. But for that, you could equally find a well-run umbrella foundation and donate through them. It would come to the same thing.

GiveWell is an aggregator. Their thing is effective altruism which tends to point to quantifiable outcomes related to human life. I'm definitely biased here because I work in child abuse prevention where we have measurable improvements but the big things to measure are very hard because the data to measure against either doesn't exist at all or is really off - like our newborn death rate is very high compared to the national newborn death rate, but then you have to factor in that we only work with very high risk mothers, so we have no way of measuring the non-intervention outcome, i.e. how many babies would have died without our help, just guesses. A lot of 'fuzzy' social and cultural goals are hard to quantify that way - so are a lot of scientific goals too.

Scale is another thing - GiveWell has to aim at large organisations that can do the research and data production they want.

If you want to do health interventions on a large scale, then yes, GiveWell is a good aggregator. But if you're interested in say increasing women's rights and child protection, you would be better off researching grant-making foundations that focus on that area and taking the time to talk to them about how they select and review their picks, then donating to them. A lot of the foundations will also let you donate 100% to the particular charity they support because they cover their running costs separately.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 8:19 AM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]


Here in Northern California, over a mountain range or two from us we had the Lake County Valley Fire back in September and October. I know a lot of people impacted by it, and did a bunch of reloading on the incident maps and trying to figure out if the houses of people I knew got burned.

Several times local groups made pleas for goods, blankets, clothings, tents, etc, and the Red Cross instantly blanketed the media with "oh, no, we just need money" calls. The local organizations on the ground got pretty pissed at the mixed message and diversion of efforts, and nobody I know who was through that fire will ever give the Red Cross another red cent.

The national organization that does actually seem to be doing good things for disaster response and preparedness is the Salvation Army. Though I cringe saying that, because they sure have some bigoted elements in their organization.
posted by straw at 8:24 AM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]


if it prompts that niche to donate when they otherwise would not, it's still a net good.

I would agree if it did have that effect, but it doesn't have the effect of getting non-donators to donate. Its target market is people who essentially have to donate for tax purposes, with some participation by people who just like to donate but are obsessed with utility, as noted above. It redirects donations, rather than generating new ones.

I also wouldn't really call them an aggregator, because you can also direct-fund any of their recommended charities. It's a hybrid sort of research org/aggregator. You are entirely right about the reporting burden, though, which is one thing I always really disliked about their model. I just spent a few minutes going through their list of all charities considered and noting how many outright declined to deal with them, and how many GiveWell eventually scratched off their list because of what they considered too much "back and forth" or because of the charity's unwillingness to allow them to publish notes from conversations they had, etc. For many organizations, the most prudent decision may well be not to waste time on this process because anticipated return is so little and so uncertain. This was a predictable outcome from the outset.

I agree that community foundations are pretty fabulous places to donate through, especially for people who are less focused on a single issue. They add to charitable efficiency and increase professionalization and are really good at directing dollars where they are most needed. And they are everywhere.
posted by Miko at 8:56 AM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]


"It's very easy to focus on the negative, a laziness the left seems especially prone to. Such a grim business, eliminating everything that isn't perfect. It seems perfection is achieved not by what you do but what you don't do."

Cool story, bro.

"Their thing is effective altruism which tends to point to quantifiable outcomes related to human life. I'm definitely biased here because I work in child abuse prevention where we have measurable improvements but the big things to measure are very hard because the data to measure against either doesn't exist at all or is really off - like our newborn death rate is very high compared to the national newborn death rate, but then you have to factor in that we only work with very high risk mothers, so we have no way of measuring the non-intervention outcome, i.e. how many babies would have died without our help, just guesses. A lot of 'fuzzy' social and cultural goals are hard to quantify that way - so are a lot of scientific goals too. "

I know that I've mentioned this before, but after working with a c3 for about a year to move them from programs and metrics that didn't actually demonstrate what they thought they were claiming they were accomplishing, one of our projects (since we're also a fiscal sponsor for a lot of smaller programs) is to help other, smaller organizations do that too. Mostly because the ED and I keep going to these seminar meetings and hearing the problems that other orgs are having and the very notion that you would want to do things like quantify outcomes seems baffling to them. Really, one of the things that I think is kinda woeful about the non-profit management world is how opposed to this sort of thinking they are — there's such a big reaction against "business" and toward softer, service orientations that, like, asking people how they would demonstrate that their after school program actually helps kids is apostasy. It's similar to what my wife talks about in the library world, where a younger generation is upsetting a hierarchy of "nice" by actually wanting to do things like have their journals publish articles that tackle research problems — there's a similar cultural divide, where people get into non-profits or libraries because they think it's antithetical to focus on money or quantifiable goals. And since my other area of experience is the arts, I see it all over. (That it's also tied to longstanding structural sexism doesn't help either.)

And the thing is, unfortunately, I think that kind of resistance and intentional ignorance really makes non-profits (and libraries) more vulnerable to the takeovers by b-school/c-suite assholes. Both in terms of donors and boards wanting more accountability, and in terms of the secondary services market, where having a better grasp on some of the fundamentals of finance or technology make you much better able to ask sufficient questions and recognize when marketing touts pitch you on services you don't need.

Luckily, there are a ton of competent, driven and smart people out there working in non-profits, but so often they have to work so much harder to accomplish things than they should have to, just because of attitudes like "talking about funding streams is dirty" or "everything should be done by volunteers."

The other thing this reminds me is to check in with a friend — her brother got brought in a couple years ago to take over the LA chapter of the Red Cross, which was deeply fucked, and part of why he was brought in was because he was a gay guy who was going to be able to get the chapter over some of its historical antipathy to the gay community. I kinda wonder how he's doing.
posted by klangklangston at 2:26 PM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


one of the things that I think is kinda woeful about the non-profit management world is how opposed to this sort of thinking

I am kinda on the fence on this. At least in my corner of NFP culture, we are serious about management, finance, strategy and evaluation. I am a wholehearted fan of metrics and use them rampantly in my work. As an educator, we're kind of trained to evaluate, evaluate, evaluate. And, at least as far as my management training has gone, we've been pretty stasticially driven. So I tend to bristle when people imply NFPs don't do these things, because professionalized ones do. At the same time, I agree with you that many NFPs, especially those with grassroots beginnings, have no such professional culture and have not yet been exposed to good NFP managerial practice. Yes, those organizations can really struggle and do seem to make errors in analysis about what they need and what measurements are for. On the third hand, there really are some outcomes that cannot be measured or are difficult to measure because they don't occur in isolation, and part of our role is to be one of the few organizations in society that can put a theoretical value on non-quantifiables as well as quantifiables.

One of the big issues in NFPs is that everyone claims to want evaluation, but no one really wants to fund evaluation, barring a few federal grantors. That means it has to become an operational expense, and that means creating more offsets, which can further distract from the services. Once you start talking in terms of measurement and analysis, you get addicted to it, and if more organizations could experience the benefits of professional evaluation, they eventually would (well, good ones would) want more of it. Similarly, I agree that more NFP finance and management education would change the working culture of staffs, boards, and even volunteers. That kind of education has not permeated the sector. It has, however, pretty well permeated the larger and more successful ones, the ARCs of the world aside. In fact it sucks that when a nonprofit this big fails so publicly and painfully, it undermines trust in the entire sector.

The beef I tend to have though is not with people proposing informed NFP business management practices, but with optimizers on the one hand, and people who think everything should be touchy-feely, volunteer run, and never examined. ARC, really, is neither of those. It's just an organization run by people with really bad ideas who aren't familiar with even mainstream, established NFP business strategies.
posted by Miko at 2:58 PM on December 17, 2015 [4 favorites]


We measure and we want to measure, but I strongly disagree that it's always possible or practical. Measuring can be a waste of resources.

So the newborn death rate, I could in theory get a researcher to pull together comparative newborn death rates in similar high-risk groups and overlay them, to make a more accurate comparison. The national newborn mortality rate was 18/1,000 in 2013 at the most recent Unicef data, but that's a macro figure. We work with about 12-20 women a year who come from a tiny pool of very high-risk candidates with specific risk factors, and this year we've had (I think) about 16 births and had three deaths. That's a newborn mortality rate of 188/1,000 which is 10x higher than the national rate, but I know for each of the three deaths, we had prenatal care and medical support and there was very little hope for any other outcome because of the complications in the cases.

What's interesting to me from a numbers perspective here is that I don't think before this that these babies who died would have existed in the official statistics either. At least two of them would have been born early at home and the families couldn't have afforded or seen the point of an official registration. They wouldn't have been recorded in the official statistics at all. And before we started doing our tiny pregnancy project two years ago, we had no idea (after a decade plus working in these communities!) just how many high risk pregnancies and neonatal deaths were happening because it went unremarked. People just buried the newborns without telling anyone official. And this is in the city, so what happens in the countryside must be even higher. Maybe Unicef takes that into account? I don't know.

But to start looking into the numbers to see whether my $18K a year program is statistically effective beyond comparing the obvious numbers would take time and effort of a decent researcher who a) I could spend the money on a more immediately useful service and B) or I could use the research on something more immediately useful like domestic violence affecting more than the 20 women in this program.

The push to have data for everything rarely comes with the funding for the manpower and resources to generate that data. And this fear of measuring things that you're talking about - it can be reasonable from people who've seen a push for data used so reports and meetings take priority over actual services, not just people who are hiding bad practices and lousy programs.

I like data and we use it a lot, but the preparation of it is exhausting work and it's overhead.

I guess GiveWell and their push irks me because the groups I like up close from working with them are generally groups that would not have made it anywhere near their criteria - human rights abuse investigation groups, groups working to close orphanages and help kids transition to adulthood, art therapy, mental health, prison outreach, legal aid, etc.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 3:42 PM on December 17, 2015 [9 favorites]


I worked very briefly with the Red Cross some years back. My take away was that the local staff were hardworking and that the volunteers were great, totally salt of the earth people. But the national staff were horrible, both in terms of how they managed and directed local resources, and how they handled volunteer and other resources during a major emergency. Since then they have closed the local branch, and everyone I know who volunteered has quit. That kind of ineptness comes straight from the top, and it is sad to see the organization continue to fail.

I assume that because they are the nonprofit equivalent of "too big to fail" that there will be some kind of bailout or imposition of administrative competence, but there is still a lot that can go wrong first.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:57 PM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


Well, how crazy is it that they could get Congress to give them a cash infusion?
posted by Miko at 7:36 PM on December 17, 2015


No, you fucking asshole, the Red Cross is not a brand to die for, it's a brand that's supposed to help prevent that shit.

Marketing-speak. She probably chose that as more courant than "drinking the Kool-Ade" or "bleeding edge" or whatever totally tone-deaf expression came to her mind. Marketers often let their need to project enthusiasm blind them to the impact of their metaphors on outsiders.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:31 AM on December 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


"On the third hand, there really are some outcomes that cannot be measured or are difficult to measure because they don't occur in isolation, and part of our role is to be one of the few organizations in society that can put a theoretical value on non-quantifiables as well as quantifiables. "

Yeah, and actually one of the things that I've been really trying to get folks to realize is that a lot of their claims are inherently unmeasurable in a way that's arguably preventing them from allocating resources on more effective programs. For example, the main folks I'm working for were running an annual teacher awards under the theory that by 1) recognizing exemplary teachers, they would 2) reduce teacher turnover, leading to 3) improved student outcomes. This was a major project for them in terms of staff time, and wasn't used as e.g. a fundraising event.

Asking things like, "How would we know if this affected teacher retention?" and "How would we know if this affected student outcomes?" led to talking through, well, the best would probably be some sort of longitudinal study correlating teacher retention with student outcomes, and then we'd have to demonstrate that these awards made the schools more attractive, which led to teachers staying longer. Except since it's LAUSD, teachers are just shuffled through the enormous meatgrinder of their HR schemes. So, for our level of resources, actually measuring student outcomes is prohibitively expensive (and requires buy-in from LAUSD, who are not really all that interested in giving anyone access to their data sets), and there's a dubious link in the idea that these awards can be linked meaningfully to teacher retention. They're popular among board members, because hey, who doesn't like giving awards, but they take up huge amounts of staff time to nominate, coordinate, etc.

Instead, let's look at pulling back to something that works with our underlying institutional partners (many of the board members come from cultural institutions; the org was initially set up to improve outcomes for kids by connecting them with cultural institutions; there's been massive drift) — while not a perfect correlation (nothing in education is), there's a fair amount of literature about the benefits of connecting kids with cultural institutions, and so let's find a way to take that money that we had budgeted to award to teachers, and maybe use it for limited grants to cover transportation costs to the partner institutions. That's something where we can 1) make a credible claim that, supported by outside research in analogous situations, access to these institutions is helpful for kids; 2) without this program, free-lunch/ESL kids wouldn't have the same level of access; 3) we can track participation in a way that's pretty seamless for everyone involved. That's also something that it's much easier to get outside funding to augment if it proves successful as a pilot program — going from something inherently unmeasurable to something that has at least a coherent theory of change underneath it.

One of the things that bugs me is that some of the few folks who do seem really interested in demonstrating efficacy of programs in educational non-profit spaces are folks like the Broad Foundation, whose data collection is top notch but whose assumptions and theories of change end up being really reductive and ultimately overstate the predictive and analytical insights that you can reasonably infer from the data.

"In fact it sucks that when a nonprofit this big fails so publicly and painfully, it undermines trust in the entire sector. "

Totally! That was part of what I was trying to get across, that the AT&T folks end up being the bullshit artists who the 'tough, business-minded' board members think that will fix their organization without recognizing that business bullshit barely works in the business world and can be fatal in the NFP world.

"I like data and we use it a lot, but the preparation of it is exhausting work and it's overhead. "

One of the things that I like about my client is that I'm working with a woman who came out of the public health world (and is also a MeFite) and part of why she left the public health world was a realization about the flawed policies that come out of fairly intractable data problems (the last big thing I remember her working on was links between pesticides and Alzheimers, doing door-to-door surveys). So it's much easier to think about it under the rubric of, "What's the idea of how this project would change X service area? What evidence could be collected to support that? What assumptions is this founded on?" and a recognition that really good data collection is often really expensive, but that there are a lot of ways to reframe program goals so that they're hugely more reasonable and much better tied to things that can be collected with modest resources. Going from, "Well, your mission is to improve peace in the Western Hemisphere, and you're running after school programs," (a real program that was part of a recent fiscal sponsorship meeting) to, "Well, by linking your general program practices to a fair amount of research, you can say that kids in after school programs are less likely to be involved in violent crime, which makes for a more peaceful community," means that the latter is much more supportable and the ability to correlate it with a more modest but still worthwhile goal while carrying on basically the same program but without the bullshit gap or the need to fund impossibly large research to quantify the effect of the program.

"What's interesting to me from a numbers perspective here is that I don't think before this that these babies who died would have existed in the official statistics either. At least two of them would have been born early at home and the families couldn't have afforded or seen the point of an official registration. They wouldn't have been recorded in the official statistics at all. And before we started doing our tiny pregnancy project two years ago, we had no idea (after a decade plus working in these communities!) just how many high risk pregnancies and neonatal deaths were happening because it went unremarked. People just buried the newborns without telling anyone official. And this is in the city, so what happens in the countryside must be even higher. Maybe Unicef takes that into account? I don't know."

If you're working in the country that your profile states (dunno how cadgy you are about it), UNICEF has done surveys of both the registration processes and the compliance rates, and found that about 90% of births are registered (from a brief perusal, I can't tell if that's saying that 90 percent of living children were registered or 90 percent of the births, including infant mortality, but their report on birth registration should have some country-specific methods, and if not, contacting UNICEF to get more detailed info is usually pretty easy). They also have a reasonable demographic portrait of unregistered births. Likewise, public health records should have a reasonable portrait of mothers with a specific complication, because even if it's more likely to be found in a specific demographic, separating that out across all mothers can give you a baseline. If you're keeping demographic data, you could likely correlate their portrait to your population, and then correlate that to the infant mortality rate of the registered births that match that demographic. It'd have some noise in it, obviously, as you'd be combining multiple noisy sources, but at least it would give you a background picture that was a little more accurate than the overall infant mortality rate.

The other thing that you probably already do is keep records with the demographics of your clients and your mortality rates over time. Since your clients are more likely to be a similar group to each other than they are to the broader population, being able to point to better rates within your specific service population. Small sample size, so big variance, but if your interventions are effective, you should be able to show a general trend of fewer infant deaths within your service population year after year, which would be a reasonable way to show that your interventions are worth the resources that they cost.
posted by klangklangston at 2:06 PM on December 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


It's Cambodia, but the population we target includes a very high rate of unregistered people. Over the last decade, birth registration has skyrocketed really well (60% in 2010, but it's apparently up to 85% in the city now) and infant mortality has also progressed quite a bit too, but there's still a gap between the official records. Unicef doesn't seem to add in estimates for home births and unrecorded home deaths.

It still comes down to time. What you're suggesting can be done and I've done variations of it but it takes resources of time, skill and in manpower, funding. I spent an afternoon earlier this year researching stats and crunching demographics and another afternoon improving the data forms for longterm analysis. But there is a trade-off: one day of my time spent doing that is one day not fundraising or doing other program development, and the data gathering and analysis has to give enough benefit to the staff and clients to be worth the time it takes from getting other stuff done.

And 95% of my funders don't read the data analysis or read just the very highest end of it. The 5% that do are great but even there it rarely seems to motivate their decision to give, but the data in the end is most useful for internal decision making.

I think that's something that people don't talk about enough here - donors really don't give sensibly. Including effective altruists. People give based on a mix of emotional narratives and attachments, not as logical robots. The comments above - people talking about local chapters and their relationships to people, even while they recognise what a mess the overall organisation might be. A charity can be very well-run and do enormous good for its beneficiaries, but if it doesn't resonate emotionally with donors, it's dead in the water.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 5:54 PM on December 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


Since there are different kinds of nonprofits there are also different relationships to data. Since I'm in the world of arts & culture, we do deal with more ineffable outcomes (what does it mean to be 'more creative?' What does it mean to "connect to your identity?" We can count certain outcomes and measure for certain kinds of learning, and we track attendance and survey responses and the like for baseline data on performance and outcomes, and we do a lot of formative evaluation to improve our exhibits and projects, but there are things in our own theories of change that are quite hard to pin down. We have one research org in our field that does tremendous amounts of longitudinal study and cross-section population studies, but it's mainly because most of their work is subsidized by the richer tourism sector, not because museums could afford a think tank like that. We are just kind of lucky they love museums and are interested in some service to the profession.

So, sometimes, I'm talking at cross purposes with people in the charitable/human services side where outcomes are more quantifiable in terms of babies fed, homeless housed, etc. In part, that's why I tend to stand up for harder-to-measure outcomes; evaluators like to say "if it exists, it can be measured," and that's true, but sometimes the kinds of collection it would take to measure an outcome like "stronger social capital and civic interactions" as a result of museum intervention is prohibitively complex and expensive. So there are some things we work forward on by looking at general indicators and we can't always draw a direct line in a logic model. And there's got to be room for that in the sector, not only because some outcomes are harder to measure, but because we need to encourage experimentation, too, and sometimes the range of outcomes can't be predicted in a first iteration - some things you have to do on spec, and analyze retrospectively, especially in the humanities/culture where there are changing program foci all the time.
posted by Miko at 8:40 AM on December 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


It's new to me, so it might be new to you folks too: "Tiny Spark is an independent news program and podcast that reports deeply and constructively on philanthropy, nonprofits, international aid and for-profit social good initiatives" (from their about page). I've been listening to their back episodes, and everyone in this thread interested in charity can probably find something interesting there.
posted by garlic at 8:33 AM on December 28, 2015


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