To take a slightly different track, one way is to ask charity employees about their theory of change. In a small charity, everyone should know what their goals are and the intermediate steps to achieving them. This is not a hard and fast rule, but if you hear lots of contradictory answers about why services are provided or there are obvious strong assumptions, the charity may be less effective.
That said, most political interventions of necessity have such strong assumptions. For example, say an organization teaches mayors in an authoritarian state to win elections through performance and consultation rather than patronage. Inevitably such an intervention has strong assumptions because they cannot compel uptake and RCT’s would be very difficult. So you might override the TOC objection if the value of the outcome is high and costs are low. You could say “there’s some low change it will work. But if it works the value is very high. So I still rate the charity effective”.
To take a slightly different track, one way is to ask charity employees about their theory of change. In a small charity, everyone should know what their goals are and the intermediate steps to achieving them. This is not a hard and fast rule, but if you hear lots of contradictory answers about why services are provided or there are obvious strong assumptions, the charity may be less effective.
That said, most political interventions of necessity have such strong assumptions. For example, say an organization teaches mayors in an authoritarian state to win elections through performance and consultation rather than patronage. Inevitably such an intervention has strong assumptions because they cannot compel uptake and RCT’s would be very difficult. So you might override the TOC objection if the value of the outcome is high and costs are low. You could say “there’s some low change it will work. But if it works the value is very high. So I still rate the charity effective”.