socialmarkets’ President, Jeff Tuller, is on NPR’s Marketplace today talking about socialmarkets. A differing opinion about socialmarkets is presented by Trent Stamp. One amazing thing we’ve found is that the people who actually like us the most are nonprofits themselves. We’ve found that the smaller a nonprofit is, the more entrepreneurial they are. As a result, we have five nonprofits listing on our site and none of them are over 15 million in annual revenue. Don’t forget this is an alpha release so we’re still testing assumptions, workflow processes and the user interfaces themselves. As we get more data, we’ll start tweaking the site to accommodate that strange thing known as reality.
And then of course, there are people like Trent Stamp. He’s welcome to share his opinion about socialmarkets but it’s funny for him to have offered one because to my knowledge at least, he’s never seen our development site or ever talked to us. It makes me wonder if the question given to him was specifically about us or some other question about the general quantifiability of social good.
One more thing you ought to notice? 11/21 is when we ring our opening bell. One of our volunteers, Rachael Barrett, has kindly donated a desk bell for us to push when we go live. Ring ring ring!
Update: Man, does our office have a lot of echoes to it! Please please please help us decorate our walls. We’ll take your suggestions and if you have kids, please have them draw their rendition of socialmarkets for us (and yes, we know it’s going to be shall we say, abstract). We will hang it up, take a photo and put it up at blog.socialmarkets.org.
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Funny…isn’t Trent Stamp’s and Charity Navigator’s whole rating system based on a Wall Street-like bottom line number (the ratio of fundraising dollars going to the charity or ratio of fundraising expenses to budget)?
Pot calling the kettle black, eh?
I believe that Holden Karnofsky over at the GiveWell blog presented the most trenchant critique of the Charity Navigator methodology. I agree for the most part with his analysis. That said, I don’t think this is Trent’s fault. It’s the sector’s fault. If you refuse to make your work public but the public still wants to look at your work, don’t be surprised if they find inadequate means to do so. It is incumbent upon the aggrieved party (in this case, our sector) to present case and project outcomes in as nonpartisan and as transparent a manner as possible. I say this about web site statistics and I say this about the way nonprofits are judged. We’ll probably discuss this more over at blog.socialmarkets.org in the future.
Well — we just answered Trent Stamp’s comments over at our blog.
awesome!!!