There are only a handful of third-party resources that do investment-grade research to help in evaluating charities, Stern said. Among them are Give Well (givewell.org), New Profit (newprofit.com), and Charity Navigator (charitynavigator.org).

And although planners should “absolutely” ask for metrics and proof of results, it’s often not reasonable to request that those metrics be cus- tomized to individual donors, cautions Heisman, whose National Philanthropic Trust is one of the top 25 grant-making institutions in the United States. “If you are giving smaller amounts, do not force the charity to do complicated metrics just for you, because you are basically burning up your money, plus more,” she said. “A lot of people want all these complicated outcome measurements, but they are only giving a gift of $5,000. It costs a lot to generate metrics. [Say] a staff person is paid $50,000 a year. You need 50 $1,000 donors to pay for a person to do program evaluation. And then you complain that you do not like overhead.”

IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU. IT’S ABOUT THEM. It’s human nature that we’re quicker to give our dollars and our time to those charities that tug at our heartstrings, rather than those that present hard, cold facts about their results — however compelling those facts might be. But virtually every charity can tell a good story or it wouldn’t be in business, Stern said. Focusing on the emo- tional storyline is “really about resonating with the donor,” he said, and “the wrong way to think about it. Part of the cultural change needs to be about helping the intended stakeholders of the activity. And really, we all shouldn’t feel very good about it if we aren’t helping people who are hungry or homeless or need education or jobs and having a long-term impact on their lives. Until we actually change that conversation from a conversation that makes donors feel good to a conversation about what is the actual impact that these charities have, I think it’s going to be very difficult for charities to really prosper and make a difference.” Thinking with greater intention about the

actual beneficiaries of groups’ community-service work is something that the PCMA CSR Task

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Force has been wrestling with, Smith said. When making decisions around CSR events, planners need to keep “the needs of the community in the foreground rather than sort of as an afterthought,” she said. “We’ve been talking about how we can help encourage meeting planners to think differ- ently about many aspects of their [CSR] event. Because I think, number one, we want to do good, but we are really almost lazy about it. We want to feel good that we have done something, but we actually do not want to get our hands that dirty. And we want an activity that is fun.... So we are going to build bicycles for a school, and that is really lovely, but do those kids really need bicycles? And we are doing it almost like a team- building activity. So it is more really about us than it is about them. I think what we really need to be leery of is giving people things they don’t need. And I think that we do it because it’s easy, and it feels good. But if people don’t need that, then it really is tokenism.” Adding to the challenge of a meeting group’s

‘I think we need to be leery of giving people things they don’t need. And I think we do it because it’s easy, and it feels good.’