Grace Nicolette
speaker
46 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Grace Nicolette’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thanks for having me.
I think that effectiveness really has many dimensions. One major dimension is, is the money that you are giving having its intended effect? Is it being well used by the nonprofit that you're giving it to?
And I think that here is an area where, without realizing it, donors actually pick up a lot of quote-unquote conventional wisdom that actually may not serve their goals very well in giving effectively. You want to be as generous as possible to nonprofits. You want to do your homework in advance. and then give so that you can kind of unleash the nonprofits to do their best work.
That means, you know, if you can, research nonprofits in advance. It's hard to make a really big gift to a group that you don't know very much about and you don't know whether their goals and strategies align with yours.
But the biggest one that we see is that donors really over focus on overhead administrative cost ratios of nonprofits. There's a sense in which nonprofits should have some sort of percentage of their operating costs that should be as low as possible. we think about it, I know where that comes from, but actually it doesn't really serve a nonprofit well, right?
You want to make sure a nonprofit has all the resources that it needs to attract the best talent, to have up-to-date systems, to be able to do their best work. And it's really hard to also just have one metric across multiple nonprofits, right? Like if you're comparing a school versus like a animal shelter, those numbers are going to be really different. So instead of
Looking at that one thing, because I think donors are often looking for like profit for a business. What is that one thing that I can look at that can just tell me whether a nonprofit is good or not? And I think that it requires a lot more nuance and a lot more education to say, no, there actually isn't one thing you have to really fully understand.
That's right. Every holiday season, I see a meme going around on social media with different nonprofit CEOs' pay levels. And the lowest CEO salary of this one organization was purported to be $13,000. And that was supposed to be a good thing. And I look at that and I'm like... How does someone survive on that? Exactly. Like, I'm not sure that that person is able to survive.
And I'm not sure that organization's attracting the best talent.
This is really the biggest question. And sometimes it's actually the hardest place to start. It's for someone to actually sit down and write down, what are my goals? And one of the challenges here is also just right-sizing your goals with how much money you can give. It's very tough to say, like, well, I would like to eradicate homelessness in my town, but I'm giving $1,000 a year.
That's not in line with the scope of the issue. Part of it is looking at how much do you want to give and what areas really touch your heart and your head first. Start close to you. Like, what are causes that mean a lot to you and your family? How were you helped along the way? And start from there. Like, find what's interesting and ask questions, talk to people, that kind of thing.
I think all are needed. You know, there really has been a big debate within philanthropy about whether or not you should always give, for instance, overseas. A lot of folks in the effective altruism movement would say that cost per life saved, dollar per life saved would actually be the most important metric. We don't believe that. And I don't believe that personally. I think that all are needed.
I think that if we believed that, we would never give into our own neighborhoods. We would never give to things that address like beauty and justice around us. And so I think it's an and and not one or the other.
The wonderful thing is here in the United States, most nonprofits have annual reports and also tax filings, the 990s. You can actually look into their website just to see like, how are they spending the money? And usually nonprofits are actually pretty clear on how they're spending it. As a donor, I would say, give in a way that gives a nonprofit the maximum flexibility.
We know some donors who give to a food bank, let's say, and we'll say, well, I only want it to go towards the food and not towards any of the overhead. But actually we saw specifically during COVID, That kind of flexibility for nonprofits is actually really key. When kids were out of school, yes, they needed food and they needed some tutoring and they needed some other supports.
And so nonprofits are on the front lines. And so if you can give in a way that is not restricted, that really helps them. And then if you have any questions, if you reach out to a nonprofit, most of the times they will call you back and answer your questions.
I'll use myself as an example. I think that when I first started giving and I graduated from college and had my own income, I was really excited to be able to give. And I just wrote a bunch of really tiny checks to a lot of small nonprofits. I didn't really have much of a strategy or a thought behind it. If someone asked me, I would be responsive.
And I think that there's a lot of power in that, too. But I think that particularly for larger donors, it really does make a difference to, again, as we talked about before, to sit down and write down, what do I hope will happen with my giving? What would I like to be contributing to?
And so having that strategy then can help bring to light, okay, well, here are the folks that I should be talking to. This is my lane, not some other lane. Because really, you could get pulled in infinite number of directions with many causes. There's so much need in the world. And strategy really is combining some of your resources and giving in a deeper way than just spreading it around.
Yes.
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