The Everyday Philanthropist

CHAPTER 13Third Question: How They Improve

Last, you want to ask how an organization knows whether or not they are making progress. An AIDS researcher does experiments and documents the results to find out if she's making progress. Charities working on homelessness or the prevention of abuse against women or anything else have to be held to the same standard. You're looking to see if they are rigorous about studying the effects of their own work, and if they change their approach if they learn something isn't working. More important, you want to know that they know when something isn't working, so you're sure they have an indicator that tells them to stop doing it and to try something else. And you want to know that they know when something is working, so they can do more of it.

Implicit in this question is another question, which is, What's your idea? Does the organization have a powerful—maybe breakthrough, big, disruptive—idea about how to solve the problem? An idea that they have tried and that has shown serious promise? Something no one has tried before? For example, the Bail Project looked at pre‐trial incarceration in a new way. They saw that innocent individuals were pleading guilty to crimes they didn't commit simply because they didn't have the money to pay bail. Incarceration was jeopardizing their employment, housing, and ability to care for their children. This gave prosecutors unfair leverage over them. Prosecutors could easily get people to plead guilty to crimes ...