Mystery shopping

What do you make of this? On 5th February 2008 I contacted eight large international development charities, all of whom are signatory to the International NGO Accountability Charter.

I asked each of them to publish a detailed breakdown of their expenditure for the last tax year. For each project funded within 2006-07 I wanted to know a) the name of the project b) the location of the project c) a list of funders for the project and d) the total expenditure on the project in the tax year.

None of the organisations has been able to produce me with this list. None were even able to give me just the names of the projects they funded over that year.

Their excuses were as follows:

• ActionAid - "we try to balance the need for transparency with what we think readers will find digestible, useful and informative"
  
• British Red Cross - "administrative processes [must] remain cost-effective, thus maximising the money available for our front line services."
  
• CAFOD - no reply
  
• CARE International UK - no reply
  
• Christian Aid - just a link to the annual report
• Oxfam - see this post and this post
  
• Plan International - no reply
  
• Save the Children - "this is a considerable amount of information for us to prepare and will use valuable resources".
  
• Tearfund - a link to total grants made to top 50 partner organisations.

This is simply unacceptable. Producing a list of funded projects annually certainly is time-consuming, especially when financial data is included as well. But charities which take a large proportion of their income from the public should consider themselves to be under a moral duty to be transparent. Publishing a list of funded activities would obviously improve aid co-ordination as well.

No doubt these thoughts were in the chief executives' minds when they signed the International NGO Accountability Charter. This states that "By signing this Charter we seek to promote further the values of transparency and accountability that we stand for, and commit our INGO to respecting its provisions." The Charter goes on to say: "We are committed to openness, transparency and honesty about our structures, mission, policies and activities. We will communicate actively to stakeholders about ourselves, and make information publicly available."

I call on these organisations to meet their commitments.

The other side to all this...

....is, of course, fundraising.

Steve Bridger's got a good blog on how NGOs can get themselves up to speed with the whole Web 2.0 thang from the fundraising point of view. This presentation summarises his (slightly evangelical but still interesting) views.

But a quick look at the development NGOs' wiki-blog-mash-up-myspace-facebook things (e.g. Oxfam's and ActionAid's) shows they haven't quite got the full picture. Web 2.0, and the associated rise in consumer personalisation and peer-to-peer interaction, demand that organisations relinquish power. Development charities can't just sit on MySpace collecting their online friends - they have to act in a genuinely friendly way too.

People want opportunities to connect and share their experiences of the organisation. If those opportunities are to be at all attractive they must be meaningful. For them to be meaningful they must include the possibility that the organisation will be criticised. It will hurt in the short-term but the early adopters will reap the rewards in the long term.