Can nonprofits Google effectiveness?

There's an important conversation going on over at Tactical Philanthropy, one that I think will greatly influence the next stage of how the public measures the effectiveness of nonprofits. It all began with Sean Stannard-Stockton's predictions for philanthropy in 2008. A list of his expectations for changes to the nonprofit sector in the coming year. Before I get into the prediction that started all of the clamor, I do want to mention one that struck home to our own little (ok, not so little) organization:

Sean believes that this year, " A United Way-authored outcome-measurement template will be adopted by the sector as the standard format for nonprofit organizations to report on their effectiveness. The narrative-driven form will soon be available for download from the home pages of many nonprofits." [see full list]

I mention this first for a few reasons.

• I think there is a real role for our organization to play here in sharing practices on outcome-measurement and facilitating a more universal and streamlined format for such metrics. We are the grandfather of nonprofits, for better or worse; we've got a history in this work. And while our age and size probably won't win us an MTV award for hipness anytime soon, it does put us in the very important and much needed role of setting an example and unifying the field behind practices that work.
• There's a need. Very simply. Measuring progress has become critical, rightly so, for any social service effort. It takes resources that some of the smaller nonprofits may not have.
• We're damn good at it (ok, that's a personal bias) but take a look at United Way of America's resource page on results-oriented philanthropy and outcomes measurement.

Now back to the part of the conversation that's spreading like wildfire....

As most of you probably know, there are a number of sites out there that donors can use to try to measure up the effectiveness of nonprofits. Many of them use different indicators to size up a charity's effectiveness, and discussions abound about how reliable these rankings are (here's one example). The result is a slew of different sets of information on the same nonprofit. Sean's idea? What if there were one central location that aggrigated all of the information. What if nonprofits were included in Google Finance portal. Now, I'm not advocating or opposing this idea, but I do think its worth talking about. Sean has a meeting with Google.org this week, to discuss what sort of information would need to be on a site like this. He asked for ideas. Check out his post and, as importantly, read the sort of responses he got from people throughout the sector.