Duseful? (Stat of the Day)

It's time for a new word to describe that which is both dull and useful. Where's Colbert when he's needed?

Today's case in point from from Guidestar:

Quick! What are the largest sources of revenue for nonprofit organizations? The public usually thinks the right answer is charitable giving, and this is certainly where most of the attention goes. But according to the Urban Institute’s Nonprofit Almanac 2008, 50 percent comes from fees for services and goods from private sources, and another 29.4 percent comes from government grants and fees for services. That’s nearly 80 percent of all of our revenue! Private contributions account for only a little more than 12 percent.

If private contributions average only 12 percent of funding, maybe it's time to reprioritize fundraising.

Rate My Nonprofit

Would it be fantastic or a disaster if there were a rating system for nonprofits informed by the people who actually work for them?

Admittedly, I’m too old to have ever used ratemyprofessor.com or ratemyteacher.com. There’s some controversy (mostly by teachers, duh) about how well ratings like those work – whether they delve into the substance or stay on the surface, whether they’re the online equivilant of people power or popularity pagent. For starters, here’s a good discussion by a professor about those sites and their accuracy.

Popularity contests aside, ever since Al Gore invented the internet and George Bush made the internets I’ve amused myself in bored moments by thinking about what I’d write on a similar, so-far-non-existent nonprofit rating site. 

Sure Charity Navigator’s helpful figuring out where, imprecisely, the money goes, and Guidestar offers up completed tax forms. But that’s just flat, one-dimensional quantative data. I want a site that gives us the qualitative and gory goods on nonprofits: what the people who work there actually say about them. The site could have ratings for specific aspects – like management, benefits, and job satisfaction.  

I can just imagine the freak-out by nonprofits when not-so-positive or not-so-fair reviews come in, and fear that potentially enough bad reviews could hurt a nonprofit. That’s not my aim. But here’s the upside: nonprofits that do well by their employees would have nothing to fear. And – gasp – could maybe learn something.