Saturday, 10 May 2014

Review Charities With Greatnonprofits

By Sebastian Troup


Many people wouldn't go to a restaurant without checking out its reputation online. Did you know you can also do the same with your charitable causes? With over 1.5 million nonprofits in the United States alone, there is a lot of information to wade through when considering the right recipients for your charitable giving. But a new partnership between Truist and GreatNonprofits will soon help make information more accessible for donors.

GreatNonprofits is the largest online social review site for charities. A nonprofit organization itself, GreatNonprofits contains over 200,000 user-generated reviews of more than 17,000 nonprofit organizations. These reviews and ratings are posted by people who have been touched by a nonprofit and want to share their story about it. Think of it as a Yelp or Trip Advisor for charities. GreatNonprofits is crowdsourced, so it includes reviews of groups of all different shapes and sizes. That means some fantastic charities, regardless of the size of their marketing budget, are getting recognized for their work by the people they have served.

With Truist's corporate philanthropy platform, GreatNonprofits was found to fit perfectly. There will be an integration of the social review date in order for Truist users to have easy access to information in terms of giving to charities. Their own reviews can also be added to the database. It is expected that this merging will truly result to stronger employee giving solution where it is incorporated in real-time reviews as well as feedbacks.

Feedback is indeed valuable where it allows nonprofits to find new supporters and be able to highlight their accomplishments. Take for instance what happened to Newport Beach, California's Oral Cancer Foundation where they sent out emails to major donors regarding the reviews made about them on GreatNonprofits. This resulted to additional $50,000 donation from two new donors and $300,000 of unrestricted funding from another donor. When before, they typically work on an annual budget of $200,000, this time their opportunities exploded courtesy of these donations.

The open-access forum GreatNonprofits provides for charities is in line with the shift to transparency so many organizations are making these days. Transparency is about putting information out there and no longer hiding behind secrecy around the operations of an organization, especially its financials. With so many choices available for donors, especially around this time of year, the GreatNonprofits' technology is welcome for people doing research on the best charity to receive their hard-earned money.

The reviews provide charities with valuable material they can use for marketing their services. Operation Understanding in Washington, D.C. attracted 188 reviews last year and is incorporating quotes from those reviews in its new brochure and other marketing material. The organization is also attributing additional fundraising to the reviews, despite the difficult economic climate.

All these benefits undoubtedly conclude that access to more information give donors and the charitable organizations corresponding benefits. So within the next year you can check out the full implementation of the data of GreatNonprofits in Truist's software suite.




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