Non-Profit Tech Blog

NOTE: The first three paragraphs of this post was written before my vacation which started on New Year’s Day…

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.