Sorry, it’s taken me so long to comment, I’ve been busy. (I’m also writing this quickly)
I am the “anonymous” funder for this review. I never asked or intended to be anonymous and generally think that anonymity has a lot of costs on the community and thus I think it should be used sparingly and only when there are great benefits.
I originally requested this review ~2.5 months ago because I had intended to make a donation to SPI that I had promised, but I had been advised not to do so due to concerns that I wasn’t being informed about. I was already talking with VettedCauses and just offhand asked him to look into them since I was busy and this was taking up a lot of my time and that I would be happy to pay for it. I didn’t ask for a full review, but I’m happy for a full review to be made of any charity.
I eventually found out about what these concerns were, found them to be minor/false and proceeded with the donation about a month and a half ago. I’m fairly happy with my decision.
I’m fairly disappointed in this review and the follow-up. I think the review didn’t engage with the charity in a way that would elicit the effectiveness of what they do, didn’t dive into any concerns people had with the charity, and generally was just lazy. Any effective review will have to talk to the charity, figure out what they do, and go beyond merely publicly available information. I think this kind of review tries to hold charities to the standard of a billion-dollar public company as opposed to a tiny charity. I saw similar patterns with other reviews, and the more these kinds of bad-faith engagement occur with charities, the less I want to trust VettedCauses.
Note that I am, of course, going to follow through on paying for the review as agreed upon but I won’t be further asking for reviews from VettedCauses .
Sorry, it’s taken me so long to comment, I’ve been busy. (I’m also writing this quickly)
I am the “anonymous” funder for this review. I never asked or intended to be anonymous and generally think that anonymity has a lot of costs on the community and thus I think it should be used sparingly and only when there are great benefits.
I originally requested this review ~2.5 months ago because I had intended to make a donation to SPI that I had promised, but I had been advised not to do so due to concerns that I wasn’t being informed about. I was already talking with VettedCauses and just offhand asked him to look into them since I was busy and this was taking up a lot of my time and that I would be happy to pay for it. I didn’t ask for a full review, but I’m happy for a full review to be made of any charity.
I eventually found out about what these concerns were, found them to be minor/false and proceeded with the donation about a month and a half ago. I’m fairly happy with my decision.
I’m fairly disappointed in this review and the follow-up. I think the review didn’t engage with the charity in a way that would elicit the effectiveness of what they do, didn’t dive into any concerns people had with the charity, and generally was just lazy. Any effective review will have to talk to the charity, figure out what they do, and go beyond merely publicly available information. I think this kind of review tries to hold charities to the standard of a billion-dollar public company as opposed to a tiny charity. I saw similar patterns with other reviews, and the more these kinds of bad-faith engagement occur with charities, the less I want to trust VettedCauses.
Note that I am, of course, going to follow through on paying for the review as agreed upon but I won’t be further asking for reviews from VettedCauses .