Charity Navigator acquired ImpactMatters and is starting to mention “cost-effectiveness” as important

According to the announcement on their blog (heard through Catherine Low).

They seem to be acknowledging the importance of cost-effectiveness now:

Why Cost-effectiveness?
Take a simple thought exercise: A program has a limited budget of $100,000 to improve literacy in a community. It can choose between two approaches to do so: one that can boost literacy by a grade level for 100 students and a second that can also boost literacy by a grade level but for 200 students. All else equal, a sensible program administrator would choose the second, as of course it reaches twice as many students. This is a cost-effectiveness decision. We have limited resources and unlimited needs. Cost-effectiveness is a decision tool that makes those resources go further—helping more people in more ways.

However, their criteria still includes:

“Direct” criterion: At least two-thirds of the nonprofit’s activities (as measured by percent of total program service expenses) are directly delivered to beneficiaries and reasonable to expect impact measurement for. Many nonprofits work one or more steps removed from beneficiaries, such as by conducting research, advocating for policy change or making grants to other organizations. We do not yet have a method for consistently estimating the impact of these nonprofits, and so have excluded them from the Impact & Results beacon at this time.

Will be interesting to see what the outcomes of this are. It first guess, I imagine it’ll be mixed.