GuideStar International Assembly

Event  GuideStar International Assembly
Date 2-3 December 2008
Venue London, UK
Theme From Local to Global: The importance of CSO information

This year’s GuideStar International (GSI) Assembly, entitled ‘From Local to Global: The importance of CSO information’, brought together 90 delegates from 19 countries. The theme of the Assembly was the importance of civil society organization (CSO) information for effective policy-making and for social action at all levels, but the most interesting thing for me was the GuideStar project itself.

GSI has big ambitions in a world where money is increasingly scarce and funders mostly seem less willing than ever to support infrastructure. It is building a global network of websites providing reports on a country’s CSOs to make them more visible to national and international audiences. By the end of 2009, the plan is to have national GuideStars in Hungary, Germany, Netherlands, Ireland, South Africa, Israel, Japan and Canada, with India and a regional GuideStar for Africa also in the offing.

The idea is that the different countries will all use a multilingual, fully internationalized ‘common technology platform’, incorporating a powerful search engine and a ‘global reporting framework’. Developing this has been the work of GSI’s formidable team of technologists over the last year.

Being able to use the common technology platform will keep costs as low as possible for national GuideStars, while the global reporting framework will facilitate communication and comparison across borders by providing a common set of fields for use by CSOs across the world – though each national GuideStar will have to make adaptations to allow for different reporting requirements.

What will all this achieve? What data should be reported? Where will it come from? How will GSI ensure the data is good enough? How do you entice CSOs to add more information? How do you get users to evaluate it? How will it all be sustainable? These are just some of the questions raised at the GSI conference.

First, what will it achieve? Bob Ottenhoff of GuideStar US was very clear that the aims are to advance transparency, to encourage giving and to enable donors to make better decisions. Several speakers stressed the importance of helping donors to make decisions between charities and ensuring that the highest-impact non-profits get the most money.

What data should be reported? Financial or programmatic? Standardized or customized? Jacob Harold of the Hewlett Foundation suggested that we start with financial data and then move on to richer programmatic information, much of which will be provided voluntarily. For Louise Holmes of Room to Read, the important thing is to ensure that reporting is useful to CSOs. As she sees it, there shouldn’t be a difference between reporting for internal audiences and communicating for external audiences: funders should be part of the internal audience.

But can the audience handle the truth? Though Martin Brookes of New Philanthropy Capital claimed that NPC likes charities that measure, report failure, and adjust to what they find, it was generally felt that most donors, even institutional funders, are not sophisticated funders – though Pushpa Singh of GuideStar India didn’t feel that you need a very sophisticated donor to engage in a ‘learning dialogue’.

Another issue is whether funders will ever agree about what they want CSOs to report, given that they mostly barely talk to each other. But participants agreed that it isn’t just funders that are at fault here: CSOs often lack the skills needed for recording and measuring and communicating what they do, and they are not much better at coming together as a sector to decide what they want to report to donors. According to Martin Brookes, NPC has been ‘staggered by the lack of contact between organizations working in the same field’.

Where will the data come from? This will vary from country to country, depending on what is already available. GuideStar will aggregate information from many sources – tax authorities, regulators, companies, community foundations, self-reported data, data from third party accreditations.

As for the quality of the information, Bob Ottenhoff suggested that we rely on ‘sunshine and the self-interest of non-profits’. If data has been supplied through a regulatory body, it was generally agreed, it is less likely to be demonstrably incorrect because of the potential for prosecution. But how do you validate information that is provided by CSOs themselves? While financial information is often audited, narrative information is more difficult to verify. In fact for narrative data that is supplied voluntarily, the best approach is probably to encourage the public to help by flagging up that it's misleading.

What about sustainability? GSI founder and president Buzz Schmidt, describing himself as ‘a purist at heart bedevilled by experience’, sees a tension between GSI’s non-negotiable commitment to operating a website that is ‘robust and free to all’ and seizing commercial opportunities that support sustainability. In both the US and the UK, the way forward seems to be a public website with income coming from providing value added data services for institutions such as foundations, companies and government. The UK’s GS Data Services, for example, has provided data to the research team at the government’s Office of the Third Sector to help them with a survey of the third sector.

Including a giving facility could also help with income generation but this doesn’t seem a likely option, with Buzz Schmidt saying he ‘doesn't believe in vertical integration’ and ‘likes the idea of a vibrant field with many different intermediaries’. Nor does he want to ‘step on the toes of other infrastructure organizations whose support GSI will need’.

The closing session addressed the question: is Africa ready for GuideStar? Apart from the usual questions about the availability and quality of data, there is also a political question, not easily resolved, about the implications of having a GuideStar making public information about CSOs in authoritarian societies.

There is also a technology issue. As David Barnard of Sangonet (South Africa) pointed out, neither information nor technology are in the top 10 list for most NGOs in Africa. Even in South Africa, Sangonet could identify only around 1,600 CSOs with a website out of 100,000. As so often in developing countries, it looks as if mobile phones will be the key. In Africa overall, there are more mobiles than bank accounts: 30 per cent now have mobiles and by 2012 this is expected to be around 60 per cent. In South Africa, coverage is already 100 per cent.

Even in the more technologically advanced setting of London, technology proved a challenge. As one Powerpoint presentation after another fell victim to lack of signal and other technical difficulties, we were graphically reminded of our increasing reliance on the internet and how we all fall apart when it lets us down.

For more information www.guidestarinternational.org