Anand Shah

We had looked, for a long while, at building an online NGO “consumer” rating system with a built in series of checks and balances, it was going to be called NGOpinions.

The basic idea was as follows:

Mission

To provide a community-driven information infrastructure to encourage the organization, collection, and sharing of valued information on the voluntary sector in India by those visiting, working within, evaluating, or supporting NGOs in India.

Concept:

NGOpinions (www.ngopinions.org) is a technology-enabled community rating and information sharing system for NGOs. The project aims to develop a platform that allows benefactors and well-wishers to obtain credible information about the diverse array of social and development organizations across India.

NGOpinions is an effort to encourage the non-profit and philanthropic communities in India to participate in a user-propelled effort to catalog and qualitatively evaluate the voluntary sector. The initiative aims to create a peer, benefactor, and supporter-driven credibility rating system that mimics the word-of-mouth process that currently propagates information about India’s development sector.

The development, charitable, and philanthropic sectors of the Indian social landscape are working at an unprecedented pace in their attempts to improve conditions in India. However, the nature of Indian bureaucracy and legacy organizational structures have left these sectors remarkably disorganized and lacking effective channels for communication, resource sharing, and connectivity with supporters and like-minded institutions.

Although there have been worthy attempts, there is no comprehensively maintained directory of non-profit institutions within India; there is no widespread platform to share best practices among organizations; and there is no public effort to collect knowledge and insight about the voluntary sector. Furthermore, the country’s decentralized reporting practices limit the government’s ability to accurately track charitable activities across the nation.

Currently the best way for individual supporters and philanthropic institutions to learn about good programs and projects is ironically by word-of-mouth. Given the modality, supporters usually need to make site visits for verification, undermining the overall credibility of the voluntary sector at large. The inability to record observations and transfer knowledge limits the efficiency of philanthropy: every information seeker has to independently verify information, usually with multiple site visits, and often find that they have merely retraced the footsteps of others. NGOpinions aims to fill this gap by developing an thorough system to encourage individuals and institutions to document their efforts to evaluate and search for organizations in a way that can be most effectively utilized by others.

One of greatest limitations to the potential of philanthropy in India is a basic lack of trust in the voluntary sector. The high cost of evaluating organizations and lack of general accountability reduces the reach of funds to beneficiaries and makes the act of giving less attractive. However, in the process of giving, individuals and institutions gather valuable knowledge that would immensely benefit the greater voluntary and philanthropic community – increasing the flow of funds into the best programs and institutions.

NGOpinions is an attempt to collect and organize the vast amount of qualitative knowledge and observations of the Indian voluntary sector that exists in the experiences of individuals and files of various institutions around the world. It will provide a standard format for people to record their observations and allow contributors and others to read a variety of perspectives, while giving them room to make their own conclusions. NGOpinions will be a free service that leverages the power of Internet technology to consolidate information and bring a high standard of legitimacy to the NGO community that currently does not exist in India.

Although the NGOpinions system will create a standardized format, it will rely on the user community to create content, including individuals, organizations, giving institutions, and others who have visited projects or have experience or collected information about the voluntary sector. By contributing observations about organizations through a carefully constructed and standardized process, participants help build a collective and transparent database of impressions and organizational information. As NGOpinions reaches a critical mass of content, other potential applications for collected information will naturally evolve and be nurtured to better serve the non-profit and philanthropic communities.