Create the S&P500 for NGO's.It's time to make a standard to compare the social impact of NGO's and social interventions.
With increased interested and investment in quantifying impact, it is becoming both possible and necessary to understand how organizations and interventions compare to the "market" of options available. I propose creating a social impact index that measures, tracks, and communicates the social impact of the bundle of organizations.
Why do it?
What if you could redirect just 1% of US donation away from less productive orgs/interventions towards more impactful efforts? How much more positive impact would be done as a result?
The data is becoming available. The field of economics is, for the moment, infatuated with development and social impact. This could be a powerful way to create a useful metric for the general population.
How to do it.
Several organizations are working to build catalogs of ratings for NGO's. An index could build a weighted average of the 500/100/50 largest organizations with available data. As universal ratings continue to develop, indices could be formed for different cause areas, with specific measures (i.e. QALY's), etc.
Comments
I logged into this website to share a similar idea and found this! As a career NGO staffer, the current "rating" system is woefully inadequate and rewards the wrong incentives, like percentage overhead and operational efficiency. Questions: What are the root incentives for charity/generosity to begin with? Does generosity/philanthropy behave under traditional economic theories? If so, why couldn't we index the best? And better yet, what law says an NGO can't make money (so as long as it goes back to the mission?) Just like in a free-market system, it takes money to make money (i.e unrestricted philanthropy). What about publicly-traded NGOs? Let the "generosity markets" determine the best charities. (I'm making a lot of assumptions but would love to work on this).
Check into the concept of "Effective Altruism" (Peter Singer) .