What a pleasure it is to do an interview with a host who has read your book and is actually interested in the issues. I was on Larry Mantle's AirTalk show this morning talking about the book. You can listen to the interview by clicking here.
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Dan,
First I want to state that the book is wonderful. The biggest thing we can take from the book is that society makes certain assumptions about how nonprofits should act and we take these assumptions as the commandments with violators being burned at the stake. Yet despite the commitment to these standards, society on a whole has not investigated the costs of these assumptions. It is only through asking if these constraints are a net benefit for society will we determine how nonprofits should operate.
In regards to this interview, if efficiency is a both imprecise and misguided, how do we fully evaluate the hundred of thousand of charities? Its hard, its costly, but that doesn't mean it is not worth while. Could you expand how we would create a proper evaluation apparatus.
Chris,
I sketch out a solution in Chapter 3 - basically a large, federally funded national assessment apparatus with teams of surveyors/analysts that perform annual updates on all charities - it could start with the human services sector, which by all accounts makes up about 15% of the total - i.e., 150,000 charities - probably half that if you count just the ones that actually complete 990s.