Bill Gates Supports GreatNonprofits in Series on Innovation

We’re thrilled to share that GreatNonprofits has been recognized for our work in collecting community feedback by Bill Gates, visionary Microsoft founder and leading philanthropist. In a special series on his Gates Notes blog, Bill and Melinda Gates showed praise for GreatNonprofits for its innovative work in transforming the way people give online:

“GreatNonprofits focuses on helping people make great giving decisions through socially sourced feedback and reviews. Increasing the amount and quality of information available to donors will ultimately make giving easier, more effective and rewarding.”

GreatNonprofits CEO Perla Ni also recently guest-penned a Gates Notes post, which we’ve included below. In her post, Ni stresses the importance of including the voices of nonprofit “clients” to help  nonprofits, government agencies, and grantmakers alike to visualize on-the-ground impact of nonprofits and also learn ways in which programs can be improved.

Note: GreatNonprofits is supported in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where Bill Gates is co-chair.

“How can donors and nonprofits measurably improve funding decisions, show program results and pave the way for improvements? One practical and cost-effective way is to empower people to participate by sharing their experiences and insights about nonprofits.

That’s why I invite you to check out GreatNonprofits.org, which offers donors crowd-sourced feedback. It also provides charitable organizations with tools to collect and aggregate community feedback –  from clients served, legislators, volunteers, partner organizations, or donors.

To date, GreatNonprofits has collected feedback for more than 14,000 US and international organizations ranging from health, education, to public policy groups.

This is a new experience for the nonprofit sector, which has traditionally lacked real-time, on the ground, feedback. But it’s also the wave of the future – practical, cost-effective tools can provide guidance to grant makers and nonprofits in creating and recalibrating programs.

Whether we are donors, nonprofit executives or clients of a nonprofit, we should all be sharing feedback on which nonprofits are making a difference, how they are doing it, and how it can be improved.”