Here at GiveLoop, we’ve been struggling with the question of accountablity. Since we allow donors to direct where they would like their money to go, we want to ensure that the organizations receiving the donations are held accountable to how they claim they will be using the donations.
DonorsChoose.org, an online charity that helps schools raise money for specific projects, handles accountability pretty well. DonorsChoose actually purchases the classroom materials, shipping items directly to the school and alerting the principal when the materials are on their way. In this sense, the donor really needs to only trust DonorsChoose and not the specific teachers to spend their money properly.
That said, there’s one big drawback: it’s expensive, and thus difficult to scale. As of this writing, there is a 13%-19% donation to DonorsChooose by default for each donation to a project. In 2009, only 59.6% of their money collected went to classroom projects materials, 31.7% went to “classroom projects processing” and “classroom projects advocacy”, and the final 8.7% went to DonorsChoose’s own administrative and fundraising costs. Although we have yet to hear back from DonorsChoose about the specifics of the terms “classroom projects processing” and “classroom projects advocacy”, it seems like well over 30% of donations are going to cover the costs of making the purchases happen rather than the purchases themselves. In other words if I donate $100 to a classroom, about $60 of those dollars will be used on actual classroom project materials. I understand that may be the cost of good service and accountability, but that still seems much higher than it should be.
I am also pretty sure this is why DonorsChoose is sticking to being a platform for public schools and not expanding to big fundraisers like NGOs, religion, or politics- the process can’t scale.
So is there another way that accountability can actually scale? The main problem is that, if Organization ABC said they used $100 on product XYZ, we need to prove:
- Organization ABC purchased product XYZ
- product XYZ costs $100
- product XYZ is being used as intended
The concept-du-jour “crowd-sourcing” is something that immediately comes to mind. This might mean to allow users to submit photos and video that visually proves if something was purchased and used as intended. This might be a good first step, especially if you can apply game mechanics on top of this to incentivize user-submitted proof.
However, user-submitted images can easily be doctored and gamed. Perhaps adding another layer of proof-scoring can improve the quality of user submissions. For example, I can approve or disapprove someone else’s proof, which would increase or decrease that proof’s score or authority (and perhaps that user’s reputation). We can also tie this system of proof to an organization’s overall accountability score, which may motivate the organization to be more transparent. In other words, tying actions to actual individual’s and organization’s reputation, could increase overall reliability of this system.
The problem is that crowd-sourcing natually draws skepticism since it is slightly counter-intuitive. I think individuals like to trust official entities like DonorsChoose rather than “the crowd”. Perhaps some gray-area might work, like a GiveLoop-moderated-crowd-sourced platform, where GiveLoop moderaters manually gives accountability scores to organizations in addition to or in combination with crowd-generated accountability scores.
This problem is definitely something we will be continually tackling as we move forward. Have any other ideas for how to scale accountability? Let us know!
