Skinner Fund letters
From CharityScorecard
Contents |
Introductory e-mail
Here's an example of the e-mail that we started sending out to non-profit organizations in January 2007 to let them know about the project and to ask them for more info:
Subject: Skinner Fund grant recommendations I am writing because we're considering _______ for grant recommendations from the Skinner Fund. The Skinner Fund is a charitable fund with about $260,000 available, which we'll start distributing in March 2007. We expect to recommend grants totaling at least $50,000 in 2007, and to finish disbursing the entire $260,000 within the next few years. Brian Skinner (I, when sent by Brian) and a few friends have set up a web site at http://CharityScorecard.org, to decide which non-profit organizations to recommend for grants. The CharityScorecard.org site includes a set of "Questionnaires" for collecting information about each non-profit organization, and a set of "Scorecards" that can be used to help identify organizations that seem like a good match for the goals of the Skinner Fund. The Skinner Fund scorecards are designed to give priority to organizations that are (a) working mainly the poorest countries in the world, (b) producing measurable improvements in public health or public welfare, and (c) working unusually openly and transparently. We have created a page for _________ on the CharityScorecard.org site: http://CharityScorecard.org/________ We've tentatively calculated a score for ________ but the total score is lower than it should be simply because we don't have all the information we need in order to calculate some of the component scores. (You can see how _________ compares to other organizations at http://www.charityscorecard.org/Skinner_Fund_scorecard) I'm writing to ask you for more information about the work ________ is doing. In particular, for our "Geography Questionnaire", we need information about where ________'s budget is spent -- how much money is spent on salaries for people who live and work in the US (and for US office space, supplies, computers, etc.), and how much money is spent abroad, in each of the countries where ________ works. We also have a "Health Outcomes Questionnaire", where we try to assess the total impact that an organization's work has on the health and lifespans of the people the organization serves. Ideally we would like to measure public health benefit in units of YLLs (Years of Life Lost) or DALYs (Disability-Adjusted Life Years). We understand that most organizations have not attempted to quantify the public benefit of the work they do, and may not have figures like these available, but we would certainly appreciate any information that you are able to offer us so that we might at least make a rough guess about the total impact of your work. If you visit the CharityScorecard.org site, you'll see that it's set up as a wiki, so that you can edit pages yourself to provide information about ________. Or you can just send me e-mail, if that's easier. I should mention that my e-mail account is set up with a "transparent inbox", so that all the mail I get is automatically posted on an archive site -- by sending mail to this address, you are placing your message in the public domain. Thanks, Brian Skinner skinner@...
Mail log
Here's our mail log, for keeping track of which organizations we've contacted so far:
| Organization | E-mail address used | 1st e-mail sent | 1st response back | 1st paper mail |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Adelante Foundation | Will at AdelanteFoundation.org | 2007-01-10 | 2007-01-16 | |
| African Medical and Research Foundation | amrefusa at amrefusa.org | 2007-01-10 | 2007-01-11 | |
| Africare | lgreen at africare.org | 2007-01-11 | 2007-01-11 | |
| Child Family Health International | info at cfhi.org | 2007-01-11 | 2007-01-11 | |
| Direct Relief International | info at directrelief.org | 2007-01-11 | ||
| EngenderHealth | ltorres at engenderhealth.org | 2007-01-11 | ||
| Global Fund for Women | donations at globalfundforwomen.org | 2007-01-11 | ||
| Global Partners for Development | info at gpfd.org | 2007-01-11 | ||
| Ipas | savingwomenslives at ipas.org | 2007-01-11 | ||
| PATH | development at path.org | 2007-01-11 | 2007-01-11 | |
| Pathfinder International | information at pathfind.org | 2007-01-11 | 2007-01-16 | |
| SHARE Foundation | stephanie at share-elsalvador.org | 2007-01-11 | 2007-1-24 | |
| Verite | verite at verite.org | 2007-01-13 | ||
| EnterpriseWorks Worldwide | info at enterpriseworks.org | 2007-01-12 | ||
| FINCA International | SLeurquin at villagebanking.org | 2007-01-18 | 2007-01-19 | |
| International Medical Corps | imc at imcworldwide.org | 2007-01-18 | 2007-02-28 | |
| Action Against Hunger USA | info at actionagainsthunger.org | 2007-01-31 |
Initial draft of InvitationLetter
Dear _____,
Your organization has been selected for review by the Skinner Fund. The Skinner Fund uses Charity Scorecard (http://www.charityscorecard.org/) to evaluate nonprofits in order to choose the recipients of more than $250,000. We would like your help filling out the scorecards, so your organization can be added to the competition as soon as possible.
Organizations are rated based on seven grades. Three grades are weighted as triple the importance of the other four:
- Transparency: This scorecard includes roughly 50 questions about what information an organization publishes about itself on its web site, rewarding organizations that take a leading role in making their day-to-day operations as open and transparent as possible. You can learn how to increase your transparency scores at XXXX
- Human Development Index (HDI): The United Nations' Human Development Index is a set of statistics published by the UN that measure average levels of well-being in different countries based on life expectancy, education levels, and GDP per capita. The HDI Questionnaire asks where an organization does its work and what the HDI levels are in those places. We assign higher scores to organizations that are working in the parts of the world where people most need help.
- Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY): A DALY is a unit of measurement that's widely used when trying to measure health outcomes. DALYs are measured by taking into account the years of life gained and the years that are lived with some disability, with a weighting for the severity of the disability. Another approach is Year of Life Lost (YLL), a unit of measurement for comparing health outcomes. At this point there isn't a specific scorecard for this value and it is difficult measure. If an organization does not have a measure of DALY or LLY, an annual list of accomplishments or measures of performance or effectiveness might allows us to assess an approximation.
The other four grades include:
- High Pay: which rewards organizations whose highest paid employee is compensated less.
- Fundraising: which gives higher scores for organizations that have fundraising as a smaller percentage of their annual expenses.
- Endowment: which favors organizations that have a low ratio of expenses to net assets.
- Growth: which is designed to yield high scores for all small organizations, and to yield high scores for large organizations that are neither quickly growing nor quickly shrinking.
We are trying to complete the scorecards soon, because we will be giving away money beginning January 2007. Please consider filling out our questionnaires, posting information on your web site or sending it to us at your earliest convenience.
Sincerely,
XXXX
Skinner Fund
Initial draft of NeedInfoLetter
Dear _____,
Your organization has been selected for review by the Skinner Fund. The Skinner Fund uses Charity Scorecard (http://www.charityscorecard.org/) to evaluate nonprofits in order to choose the recipients of more than $250,000. Organizations are rated based on seven grades. Three grades are weighted as triple the importance of the other four:
- Transparency: This scorecard includes roughly 50 questions about what information an organization publishes about itself on its web site, rewarding organizations that take a leading role in making their day-to-day operations as open and transparent as possible. You can learn how to increase your transparency scores at XXXX
- Human Development Index (HDI): The United Nations' Human Development Index is a set of statistics published by the UN that measure average levels of well-being in different countries based on life expectancy, education levels, and GDP per capita. The HDI Questionnaire asks where an organization does its work and what the HDI levels are in those places. We assign higher scores to organizations that are working in the parts of the world where people most need help.
- Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY): A DALY is a unit of measurement that's widely used when trying to measure health outcomes. DALYs are measured by taking into account the years of life gained and the years that are lived with some disability, with a weighting for the severity of the disability. Another approach is Year of Life Lost (YLL), a unit of measurement for comparing health outcomes. At this point there isn't a specific scorecard for this value and it is difficult measure. If an organization does not have a measure of DALY or LLY, an annual list of accomplishments or measures of performance or effectiveness might allows us to assess an approximation.
The other four grades include:
- High Pay: which rewards organizations whose highest paid employee is compensated less.
- Fundraising: which gives higher scores for organizations that have fundraising as a smaller percentage of their annual expenses.
- Endowment: which favors organizations that have a low ratio of expenses to net assets.
- Growth: which is designed to yield high scores for all small organizations, and to yield high scores for large organizations that are neither quickly growing nor quickly shrinking.
You can see how your organization rates so far at http://www.charityscorecard.org/Skinner_Fund_scorecard. We are missing some information that will allow us to complete the scorecards. Can you help us fill in the blanks?
Specifically, we are missing XXX
We are trying to complete the scorecards so that we can start giving away money in the beginning of 2007. Please send us the information, or even better post it on your web site, at your earliest convenience.
Sincerely,
XXXX
Skinner Fund
