Skinner Fund
From CharityScorecard
The Skinner Fund is a Scorecard Fund that was set up by Brian Skinner in 2006. Brian started the Charity Scorecard wiki as a place to collect information about non-profit organizations and work collaboratively on deciding what organizations to distribute the money to.
Contents |
Goals
- give away $260,000 such that it does the most possible good
- use the Charity Scorecard web site to...
- share information about non-profit organizations
- encourage openness and transparency
- collect quantitative metrics
- promote cost-benefit comparisons
More Goals
- give the money away sooner rather than later
- (reasoning: people need it now, and because of the Law of Accelerating Returns, more good gets done if you start early)
- start giving it away this year
- finish giving it all away in a matter of years, not decades
- give the money toward the types of interventions that do the most good
- (reasoning: giving $1,000 to pay for famine relief and giving $1,000 to pay for dance lessons both create value, but the famine relief does more good)
- study the work of other people who have tried to figure out what does the most good
- read the book Global Crises, Global Solutions
- compile a list of cost/benefit numbers for different types of interventions — for example, as a baseline, one claim is that the average cost of saving a human life for one year in the third world is $62
- give the money to organizations that can use it most effectively
- (reasoning: two organizations may both be doing very similar AIDS prevention work, but one of them may be doing it twice as effectively as the other — perhaps due to economies of scale, or lower overhead, or a focus on a different region of the world)
- study the work of other people who have tried to compare the performance of different organizations
- learn more about the Keystone project, working for accountability and transparency for social change organizations
- compile a list of cost/benefit numbers for different organizations
- try to be fair
- try not to be influenced by personal connections with people at charities — evaluate organizations as objectively as possible
- help the people who need it most, without bias based on race, religion, nationality, or sex
- encourage cultural change in the way organizations work
- let the candidate organizations know that the donation decisions are based on quantitative criteria and comparative performance, rather than personal relationships or positive impressions
- give to organizations that are working openly and transparently — for example, using a creative commons license for everything they post to the web — and, posting way more day-to-day content to the web, like lists of employees, and weekly departmental meeting notes, and all of their QuickBooks records
- be a visible role model
- work in an open and transparent way, so that other people can find out about the project
- invite friends to get involved in different ways during the project
- write up some short summary stuff after the project, and send that to friends or post it on the web
- finish what you start
- don't bite off more than you can chew — pick realistic goals
- borrow some ideas from extreme programming and agile development — produce a simple solution quickly, and then iteratively add value to it
- stay motivated — invite friends to get involved and share enthusiasm for the project — maybe: recruit a board of advisors to monitor progress? — maybe: arrange to cede philanthropic control over some portion of the funds for each milestone that I miss?
People
Brian in 2002
- Brian Douglas Skinner
- Brian is a software engineer, now in his 40s, living in San Francisco. Brian set up the Charity Scorecard site in 2006, with the goal of using it to figure out how best to give away $260,000. This Charity Scorecard project is his second take at amateur philanthropy. The first time he tried it was in the early 1990s, which led to his 1993 Gumption Memo. For more about Brian, see User:Skinner. For contact info, see Brian's transparent e-mail account.
- Brian's mom
- Before retiring, Brian's mom worked at the World Bank, occasionally traveling to Africa. She worked for many years on the Onchocerciasis Control Programme, a project which prevented an estimated six hundred thousand cases of African river blindness. She provided the inspiration and means to make the Charity Scorecard project possible. She has now retired to the family farm in Kansas, where she drives a pickup truck and lives in a stone cottage dating from the 1800s.
- Rachel Katz
- Rachel is a friend of Brian and Patricia's and got roped into the project while in between projects of her own. Rachel co-founded and lives at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in northeastern Missouri. She is also helping with her friends' nonprofit, The Mosaic Project, which brings together diverse children in the Bay Area, empowering them to strive for peace. For the Charity Scorecard, Rachel is filling out questionnaires and generally helping out.
Mailing Lists
- We have two Skinner Fund mailing lists...
| sf-news@skinnerfund.org | sf-discuss@skinnerfund.org | |
|---|---|---|
| content | occasional newsletters and announcements | day-to-day work, questions, ideas, open discussion |
| audience | for people who want to keep an eye on the project but who don't want to be actively involved | for people who are actively working on the project, and for newcomers who are curious about the project and want to ask questions or make suggestions |
| traffic volume | low traffic -- maybe one post per week or per month, with news about what new grant recommendations we've made, and what new organizations we've created pages about | higher volume |
| subscribing | sf-news sign-up | sf-discuss sign-up |
| posting | Anybody can subscribe to either list, but you must already be subscribed before you can post | |
| archives | sf-news archives | sf-discuss archives |
| license | All of the content posted to the lists is publicly available. Copyright rights relinquished under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication. By posting to either list, you are placing the posted content in the public domain. | |
Transparent E-mail Accounts
In addition to the sf-news and sf-discuss mailing lists, Brian Skinner and Rachel Katz have their skinnerfund.org e-mail accounts set up as mailing lists, as an experiment in operating transparently. The whole notion of transparent e-mail accounts is fairly new, and most people aren't familiar with it. (The earliest mention of the idea that I've come across is seems to be an old 2002 post by Ray Ozzie, who has now taken over from Bill Gates as Chief Software Architect at Microsoft.) Here's how it works...
| skinner@... | katz@... | |
|---|---|---|
| content | Brian Skinner's e-mail -- anyone can send mail to Brian at his e-mail address, but only Brian can reply from his e-mail address | Rachel Katz's e-mail -- anyone can send mail to Rachel at her e-mail address, but only Rachel can reply from her e-mail address |
| audience | for people who are curious to see all the mail that Rachel and Brian get about the Skinner Fund, and their replies | |
| subscribing | skinner@... sign-up | katz@... sign-up |
| archives | skinner@... archives | katz@... archives |
| license | All of the content sent to this address is publicly available. Copyright rights relinquished under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication. By sending me mail, you are placing the posted content in the public domain. | |
Money
Currently, at the start of 2008, the project has assets of about 239,000 USD. All of this is available to be given to 501c3 charities or spent on in-house projects.
- Where is the money held?
- The money is in two pools. The first pool, amounting to about 121,000 USD, is being held in a donor advised fund. That money is invested in the stock market, in international index funds. I have the money in the stock market in an attempt to maximize the investment appreciation, in order to have more money to give away. I used index funds because of their convenience and relative low volatility. And I chose international index funds because I have strong feelings about the importance of internationalism, and the importance of global economic development, and the importance of breaking down national barriers. The second pool, with about 118,000 USD, is invested in pools of microcredit loans. The majority of those microcredit loans are in central Africa, with some additional loans in Cambodia.
- What is a "donor advised fund"?
- A donor advised fund is an investment fund run by a community foundation or other public charity. The donor (who in this case is Brian) deposits money in the fund by making donations to the organization that runs the fund. The donor can't ever withdraw the funds, but the donor can recommend that specific grants be made to eligible charitable recipients. The organization that runs the fund is free to accept or reject the recommendations, although in practice these organizations accept the vast majority of recommendations made.
- Where can the money be given?
- The money held in the donor advised fund can only be given to organizations that qualify as exempt under the United States Internal Revenue Code. In the past I have only given to 501c3 non-profits, although it may also be possible to give to other 501 charities, or to organizations that qualify under section 509(a)(1), 509(a)(2), or 4942(j)(3). Like the money in the donor advised fund, the money being held by Brian could be given to any qualified non-profit organization, but it could also be used for other projects, if there was a compelling reason to fund some effort that was not organized as a tax exempt charity.
Giving Plan
- ✓ Step 1 - List organizations
- Assembled a small list of 20 or 30 organizations that seemed, subjectively, like they're working on the sorts of problems that are serious but amenable to cost-effective intervention
- ✓ Step 2 - Create questionnaires
- Came up with a small set of questionnaires to keep track of the sorts of information that I'm most interested in about the organizations
- ✓ Step 3 - Fill out questionnaires
- Started filling out the questionnaires for each organization. The questionnaires can be completed either by me, or by other volunteers, or by people at the organizations themselves.
- ✓ Step 4 - Create a scorecard
- Developed an initial Skinner Fund scorecard that assigns a scores to an organization based on the information in the questionnaires that have been filled in about the organization.
- ✓ Step 5 - Recommend grants
- Based on the scores of the organizations, I decided which ones to recommend giving grants to, and then contacted my DAF and recommend grants. In 2007 I made grant recommendations totaling $50,000. I made monthly grant recommendations over a span of 10 months, each month making $1,000 grant recommendations for each of the five organizations with the highest scores on the Skinner Fund scorecard. For a breakdown, see the page Skinner Fund bookkeeping.
- Step 6 - Regroup
- In 2008 I'm rethinking my approach. The 2007 grants were not as effective as I had hoped they might be as a tool for engaging with non-profit organizations and encouraging transparency. I'm now thinking about different approaches for distributing the money that might lead to higher utility.
