Excellent database for nonprofit reviews and information

One of the challenges for a potential donor to overcome is how to get a good unbiased impression of the work a particular registered charity accomplishes. One of the most pivotal considerations for a donor is establishing just how well a nonprofit executes its goals and mission and just how effectively these accomplishments are aligned to ‘what it says on the packet’. Fortunately there are a number of excellent resources online to help you evaluate just where you might determine that your support should go. There are literally hundreds of thousands of worthwhile nonprofit organizations within North America, each with very unique missions and strategies and while it’s easy to read and learn about their targets sometimes what you want most is the testimonial of someone who has already donated to a specific nonprofit.

Over the last few years I don’t think I’ve ever tried out a new restaurant without reading user reviews on yelp.com. Yelp is a directory of businesses ranging from restaurants to record shops, yoga studios to recording studios. Once a businesses is up and running you can depend on yelp to provide you with a range of reviews and ratings to help you decide where you might want to put your hard-earned dollar. A new website that I found today hopes to accomplish the same for nonprofits.

GreatNonProfits.org has been put together under the same premise, where an individual with a direct experience with a charitable organization can leave an informed opinion and rating for the organization. While the concept is very simple the success of such a database if used by many can be invaluable both for donors but also for nonprofits seeking to raise their profile and enhance their reputation. Nobody connected with the site writes reviews and the contributions are limited to those who have been involved in the nonprofit or have benefited from their services. The database that the site is built upon is absolutely huge, in excess of 1.2 million nonprofits can be reviewed and rated via the website from the smallest local charity operation through to global organizations, everyone is represented. The website was founded in 2007 and has since built up an impressive pedigree of information from diverse users which then forms an aggregate score based on all the reviews submitted and approved.

Just to take one example of a reasonably small Humane Society in Eugene, Oregon named Greenhill Humane Society. The organization shelters homeless companion animals and seeks to prevent pet overpopulation through free and low-cost they spay and neuter programs. In a single year the program has performed over 3,400 animal surgeries and works with over 100 foster families in the metropolitan area. The website contains a link to the nonprofit itself, a profile of the work they do including the mission plus a synopsis of the results to date. The profiles are maintained and kept current in every circumstance and just for this example more than 30 reviews have been posted to the database to help build the depth of information which is the goal of the site.

Even nonprofits that lack any reviews our house in the database and the profile can be claimed by an individual associated with the respective.org in order for reviews to be posted to the site. The founder of the website Perla Ni was inspired to create the database when trying to evaluate which nonprofits were accomplishing the most to help the victims of hurricane Katrina. She writes:

“It struck me, as I struggled professionally to find great nonprofits for our magazine to write about, that there needed to be an online “Zagat,” if you will, for nonprofits that would collect stories and reviews of people — people like me, the victims of Katrina, and hundreds of thousands of others — who have seen the impact of nonprofits up close, and can speak personally and firsthand about it”

The website also offers tools for nonprofits to interact with their donors and build strong relationships with those of they connect with. In addition to being able to build a profile, the nonprofit is also able to respond directly to comments left on the database so that it is a two-way street of communication and information.

I encourage you to visit great nonprofits.org via their website and learn more. Hopefully many of you could also contribute to the reviews database based on your own experiences.