On New Year’s Eve I learned about the problems over at GiveWell from the Agitator blog. Full disclosure: I really like Holden and we hang out. He gets invited to socialmarkets events. We have even karaoked together. It’s a damn shame. And no, I’m not planning to shun him Dwight Schrute style over this.

In short, Holden posed as an innocuous user over at MetaFilter asking a general question: “what is the best high-performance charity?”. He then logged on as himself to answer the question. A smart user figured out the similarity in IP addresses and drew the appropriate connections. Holden, to his credit, has answered and apologized on his blog. It’s unclear at this early date whether this is going to make it difficult for GiveWell to proceed but I hope they do. However, I suspect that this isn’t going to blow over quickly. Even before this controversy erupted, it was clear that people found Holden’s blogging getting under their skin. In my own way, I thought the topics he raised was good medicine for the sector regardless of his Ivy League and hedge fund pedigree.

And of course the Metafilter crowd is now tracking down Holden’s every posted comment on the Web and trying to see if he did further sockpuppetry. This isn’t technically “astroturfing” as that also implies a third party has been hired to act as members of the general public to praise GiveWell. This seems to have been a Holden-only affair. And hopefully, he’s done a full accounting of his wrongs in his latest blog post.

And as I return from my vacation, I see that Holden was demoted at GiveWell. His partner, Elie was also assessed a fine of $5000. Apparently, Elie posted under the name of someone named “Talia”. I’m very conflicted about this because I really want to see GiveWell continue its efforts in increasing transparency in the nonprofit sector and punishing Holden and Elie would seem to hobble GiveWell badly considering that they’re the only real employees that GiveWell has. However, GiveWell’s efforts aren’t the only transparency efforts in the nonprofit sector. That said, I think GiveWell may well be in deeper trouble than I originally thought a couple of weeks ago. It’s proven now that both principals at GiveWell has engaged in sockpuppetry. That definitely lowers their standing with me. It’s just an arrogant and stupid thing to do and it has all the appearance of being organized whether or not they claim otherwise. It’s the talk of the town. I was just at a nonprofit meeting just yesterday and talk about this issue came up entirely on its own. I’ve heard and myself used terms such as hubris and irony to describe the entire matter.

I also happen to know personally Jeff Trexler who has also commented on this affair. I’ve talked to him to help me formulate my response because frankly I was conflicted about my own feelings. I couldn’t adequately separate my personal and professional feelings on this matter but I think I have after talking to him. The most salient point here is that you CANNOT engage in dialogue about transparency without being transparent yourself. This means no masks. No fooling around. No playing the Joker. And sadly, for Phil Cubeta of Gift Hub, no satire. This means that GiveWell is going to have severe problems continuing its mission simply because the trust is not there.

As a result, my idealistic self would rather that GiveWell just fade away as an enterprise simply because GiveWell has become a symbol of everything that nonprofits hate about metrics, accountability and transparency and the culture of the MBA taking over “our” sector. Indeed, I believe that certain things are still left undone by the GiveWell board such as formal apologies to DonorsChoose and Charity Navigator. They need to redress not just the professional foibles of Holden and Elie as GiveWell employees but the external harm that GiveWell created for the issue of transparency and accountability. In a perfect world, Holden and Elie should have been fired but this is not a perfect world, and GiveWell probably can’t survive without them. It’s a heck of a mess as a result. What’s not a mess is GiveWell’s web traffic as shown in the graph below:

That isn’t an estimate — following my advice, Holden placed this Quantcast tag on the GiveWell site for more transparency. It shows GiveWell’s traffic due to their incredible PR blitz in December. They are at  2,500 visitors a week right now. My pragmatic and empirical side is telling me that GiveWell will continue despite what MetaFilter users say and the schadenfreude of the entire nonprofit community.

For GiveWell, what works in their favor is that the status quo still exists. Foundations aren’t particularly transparent and GiveWell is still, despite its flaws, a better vehicle for transparency but only it’s the only foundation that tries to make their process transparent. On the other hand, if Elie or Holden had been working at a larger foundation, they would have been summarily dismissed. And the same would have applied if they had been working at DonorsChoose or Charity Navigator. Imagine the opprobrium if Trent Stamp had done this instead of Holden and Elie!

Right now, they’ve got web traffic, notoriety and a badly damaged brand. Can GiveWell parlay those assets into something different?  It remains to be seen whether or not nonprofits and/or donors will approach GiveWell in the future. However, I don’t think it’s impossible that they can turn their ship around. They’ve just published their first post-controversy blog entry and there are still hangers-on who are questioning their every word (and rightly so). One thing that can be said is that the blog entry is from Elie and seems to be more conciliatory in tone than Holden’s earlier postings. From what I can tell, it’s going to be a matter of the MetaFilter community’s stamina vs. GiveWell’s. My guess is that six months from now, GiveWell will be able to recover from all this (assuming no more online eruptions). With an open mind, we should see what comes out of GiveWell for the next six months and judge GiveWell in the way they judge nonprofits — by their output. If their output is better organized and more rigorous, and their blogging ticks off less people just by a simple acknowledgment of their own imperfections then we might all be happier with that outcome.

And the philanthropic world will never be the same again.

Kudos to Holden and Elie at GiveWell for what I believe to be a groundbreaking approach to philanthropy. They are -gasp- releasing their analyses of multiple nonprofit organizations COMPLETE with the grant application materials that the nonprofit sent to GiveWell. This is the first time I’ve seen this kind of thing on the Web. Dear reader, please e-mail me at abenamer@nonprofittechblog.org if I’m wrong. Forget about Charity Navigator or Guidestar, GiveWell is the real deal when it comes to transparency and accountability in the nonprofit world.

Use GiveWell to inform your organization of what other nonprofits are doing. I think of this as the only way to see how other nonprofits are building their grantwinning programs. Yes, all the information is out there in all its unvarnished glory. Information wants to be free (and how!) What’s fascinating are the reports that nonprofits held back. You can find those reports by going to http://reviews.givewell.net/node/17 and then clicking on the names of Round 1 applicants. For instance, the Women’s Venture Fund has a note attached: “Note – all materials withheld due to confidentiality request ” Ouch.

I’m not an entirely big fan of a lot of the newer philanthropic “Web 2.0″ sites out there but I’ll report on them because it’s clear that philanthropy is changing and there’s some interesting tech involved. However, these newer sites don’t really change the way that nonprofits operate.

reviews.givewell.net was all done in Drupal. I gave Holden some fairly useless advice about Drupal but I think he used some outsourced developers and got it all together for a very low price. Holden has used Drupal well but I believe that the information he has posted needs to be better organized. He asked for comments on the site. Here are some from a techie’s point of view:

• Needs a good IA and a good front-end developer – the site is crying out for some IA and usability love
• Real forums to discuss issues on the site
• The comments feature in Drupal is buried at the bottom of the page. Arrgh.
• The pages are way, way too long. It’s a LOT of scrolling.
• Where’s the Quantcast tag so I can see this site’s traffic statistics?

All my specific philanthropy-oriented comments will go on over at my OTHER blog over at blog.socialmarkets.org. I probably won’t have time to post anything until AFTER socialmarkets launches on the 21st but I promise you’ll see them soon.

GiveWell is a great new service to check out and a tremendous challenge to nonprofits out there. They’re a bunch of donors looking to leverage the Web so that they can ask questions of nonprofits. Their stated goal is as follows:

Our goal is to make it easy for you to do as much good as possible with your charitable donations.

We believe that in giving, as in everything else, generosity and good intentions are helpful but not sufficient.

Nonprofits should be thoroughly analyzed and compared with each other, in order to determine which ones can most improve the world.

We aim to do this in a transparent, centralized way, so that anyone and everyone can see and comment on what we’ve found.

I believe their questions: “what are you trying to accomplish? and… what’s your evidence that you can accomplish it?” are pretty darn reasonable. Let’s hope that more nonprofits can answer those questions! GiveWell people — e-mail me and I promise that I can get those questions answered in probably more detail than you want.