Request for Guidance: Following Timeline After Charity Didn’t Object
Introduction
Vetted Causes writes articles about charities. Thus far, we have published articles about two charities. In both cases, we did not show the articles to the charities prior to publication, and were recommended by the forum to do this in future articles.
Based on this recommendation, we decided to do this for our next article. However, we’ve ran into some issues, which we’ve described below.
What Happened
On March 26th, we informed the charity about our plans to write an article about them. We also said:
we will show this response to [_____] 24 hours before publishing (or more if you would prefer). Additionally, we will send clarifying questions to [_____] prior to writing the responses in order to ensure there are no misunderstandings.
The charity responded on March 27.
On April 3rd, we sent three clarifying questions but did not receive a response.
On April 4th, we informed them:
We wanted to let you know that we plan to post [______] next Thursday (April 10th). Once [_____] have sent us your answers to the questions we sent (two different questions were also sent to [______]), we will complete our response and send it to you within 24 hours for your review.
We also gave a reason for wanting to post the article soon.
On the morning of April 9th, having received no response to our last two emails, we sent the article to the charity and reiterated our plan to publish on April 10th.
On the afternoon of April 9th, the charity responded saying they are disappointed that their request to check on deadlines had not been accepted and that they will be posting about it.
However, after reviewing all previous emails, we could not find any request to check on deadlines.
Note: instead of providing only a description of what happened (which could be inadvertently biased), we’d prefer to post the actual emails that were sent. However, we understand that posting emails can be considered inappropriate. We’ve asked the charity if we can share the emails that were exchanged, and will update this post if they agree.
Update: the charity’s director said we are free to post pictures of the emails. You can find them here.
Our Thoughts
Given that we informed them on April 4th of our plan to post on April 10th — and they did not object until April 9th after receiving the article — we believe it is reasonable for us to proceed with the original timeline.
Our team worked hard to meet the April 10th timeline (including staying up past 5AM on multiple nights this week), under the understanding that there were no objections to it. Had we been informed earlier of any concerns, we would have been more open to adjusting our plans.
Our Question
Would it be inappropriate for us to post the article on April 10th?
We apologize if the answer to our question is obvious, but this is our first time sending a charity an article prior to publication, and we are doing our best to navigate it thoughtfully.
I don’t understand what a “request to check on deadlines” is. Were they requesting an extension of time to respond to the clarifying questions?
Based on the limited information provided, I would not publish tomorrow. 24 hours is not that much time from seeing the draft article to turn around a response, especially when the particular 24-hour period was not selected in consultation with the charity. Unless there is a breaking-news element to the draft article, I would routinely grant more than 24 hours to comment on it. To me, that is enough to forbear from publishing tomorrow without getting into the [edit: delete
lost]e-mail issue at all. Opining on how long of an extension would be appropriate would require knowing a lot more information about the organization, the article, and the clarifying questions.Hi Jason, thank you for your insights. We have decided not to post the article today to respect the charity’s wishes as reasonably as we can.
We did not mention this in our initial post since we did not yet have permission from the charity (Sinergia) to post the emails. Now that we have permission, the full context regarding the “request to check on deadlines” can be found here (we don’t want to strawman what Sinergia meant when they said this).
Also, to clarify, Sinergia has indicated to us that no email was lost.
@VettedCauses DM’d me asking if I could look at this situation (I’ve been pushing a norm of running things by orgs before publishing while also sometimes talking about downsides). I read the emails that VettedCauses shared below.
Overall, it seems to me that Sinergia is behaving pretty reasonably in this exchange, and Vetted Causes is not being clear enough in setting expectations about timelines and what opportunities Sinergia would have to correct things before publication. I especially think the “After Charity Didn’t Object” in the title isn’t right.
Under the circumstances, if I were VettedCauses I would write something like:
Emails, with thoughts interspersed:
Basically reasonable, though “We do plan to eventually release full responses to ACE and Sinergia’s responses. In order to respect ACE and Sinergia’s wishes, we will show this response to both of you at least 24 hours before publishing (or more if you would prefer).” shows less understanding of how organizations work than I’d like to see from a charity evaluator, even a volunteer-run group. Better would be (a) default to an amount of time where the organization could plausibly review and respond without dropping everything, probably a week, (b) give more indication about when this might come than “eventually”, and (c) clarify up front whether Vetted Causes is willing to engage in back-and-forth to improve the draft or whether they’re just giving Sinergia the ability to prepare a public response.
Also basically reasonable. In an ideal world Sinergia would be less prickly about whether VettedCauses is trying to redirect money between broad cause areas. Note that Sinergia is giving a counterproposal, requesting that the process be that first Vetted Causes shares drafts and then Sinergia says how long they will need. I don’t think Vetted Causes has to agree to this, but unless if they didn’t want to do it this way it would have been good to say something.
This would have been a good time to mention the desire to record the call. This isn’t a default in our society, and if Vetted Causes has a policy of requiring recordings that would be good to include up front.
Clarification on diversion is helpful.
I guess it’s fine for Sinergia to suggest this, though it would be better for the focus to stay on the review process.
This is a weird message. It feels very aggressive and unprofessional, and it’s not taking into consideration that it’s asking for something unusual. It think it would have worked a lot better as something like:
And then instead of asking for statements over email, doing the conventional thing of (a) confirming that Vetted Causes has consent to record before turning on recording and then (b) repeating that recording is happening after turning it on, so that it’s captured and it’s clear that anyone remaining in the call is aware they’re being recorded.
(I’m undecided on whether it’s reasonable for VettedCauses to have an all-charity-meetings-recorded policy)
Very reasonable response!
If someone has just said they don’t want to be recorded, it’s pretty weird to immediately respond by inviting them on a podcast.
More clarity on “send our response to you prior to publishing it” would be better. Especially since Sinergia had requested a structure earlier (“after reviewing them, we will inform you of the time required to provide our response”) and Vetted Causes hasn’t indicated they have a problem with that.
Giving Sinergia a timeline on publishing is good, but the information on when they’ll be recieving the draft for comments is pretty messy. For example, setting aside the timing of Sinergia’s responses, it sounds like if ACE doesn’t give a response until, say, Wednesday April 9th then Sinergia might not get to review before publication. And if ACE’s response comes in on the 8th (as Vetted Causes says it did) then Sinergia only has a few hours to review before publication.
Ideally Sinergia would have pushed back on this timing.
As above, I think 24hr is way too short to be practical. Sinergia did push back on this originally, but I think in a way that VettedCauses didn’t understand was pushback (“after reviewing them, we will inform you of the time required to provide our response”).
While it’s good that Vetted Causes is now making it clear that they’re not planning on updating their article in response to issues Sinergia raises, it would have been much better (as I wrote above) to set these expectations from the beginning if that was indeed VettedCauses’ plan.
Sending without citations makes this way more work for Sinergia, since I expect a major thing they want to check is that they’re not being misquoted or having quotes taken out of context. While this doesn’t make sharing the draft with Sinergia useless, it does remove a lot of the value. Additionally “we will get back to you as soon as possible” is pretty weak in a context of “we’re publishing tomorrow”. While I think fixing the VettedCauses process to allow sharing cited drafts would be the way to go, saying something like “within 1hr if you request between 9am and 5pm” would help indicate that VettedCauses is committed to doing their part to make this short deadline possible (setting aside that I disagree the urgency is necessary or helpful).
Pretty reasonable!
Yes, it does sound like VettedCauses missed the significance of the “after reviewing them, we will inform you of the time required to provide our response”.
How did you get the text of the emails? We didn’t think we posted it or share it with you, and you’ve included information we didn’t think we posted, including the name of a previously anonymous member of Vetted Causes.
Uh oh! The emails you shared do include the full text, but with black bars added on top in Google Slides. This doesn’t actually remove the information, and is a mistake people sometimes make when trying to redact things. Because I used an LLM to transcribe the emails, which used the underlying images, I ended up with the unredacted text. I’ve now gone through my comment above and put
[redacted]anywhere I see a black bar, but you should be aware that the information is still in your slides for anyone to extract.Thanks for letting us know! Thankfully there was nothing that important that we covered in black bars.
In the future the most reliable way to redact a screenshot is:
Open the screenshot and add the black bars
Save the edited screenshot as PNG
Since PNG doesn’t support layers or history, the redacted information is reliably no longer present.
Thanks for the tip! We’ve implemented it.
Hi VettedCauses. (Disclaimer: not posting this as a mod, though I am one).
The 24-hour deadline doesn’t seem ideal from your perspective or from theirs. The benefit of sharing a draft with a charity is two-directional: you learn further context which can stop you from publishing uninformed arguments/ make your case stronger and they get to respond in a timely manner (ideally at the same time the critique is published) meaning that your critiques will be more likely to be taken constructively. I get the impression that you are underweighting the benefits to you. 24 hours is very short notice for a busy charity, and barely gives them more notice than just publishing the post. To get the benefits of sharing the draft, I’d strongly recommend (as Jason also suggests in the comments) liaising with the charity to find out how long they need to respond appropriately before you publish.
Unless there is something in the post which needs to be urgently announced (i.e. it’s particularly action-relevant in the next couple of days) or holding off for longer seriously decreases the odds of you publishing the critique at all, I don’t see the case for publishing now without feedback.
PS—thank you for being open to changing your approach with these articles. It’s really important to have independent and thoughtful evaluations of charities (it’s part of what we are here for), and I’m grateful that you’re willing to adjust your methods based on feedback from the Forum readers and the charities.
Hi Toby, thank you for your thoughtful reply.
We did not mention this in our initial post since we did not yet have permission from the charity (Sinergia) to post the emails. Now that we have permission, here is additional context.
Our article is about factual corrections to Sinergia’s response to our review of them. We believe our organization has been suffering reputational harm from factually incorrect claims in Sinergia’s response, and we’ve been trying to move quickly to correct the record.
Here’s a brief timeline:
On March 26, we emailed Sinergia informing them of our plan to publish an article responding to them.
On March 27, we scheduled a call with Carolina (Sinergia’s director) after she accepted our offer to do one.
On April 2, we informed Carolina we would need consent to record the call. In response Carolina canceled the call.
On April 3 (now knowing we wouldn’t be able to ask our clarifications on the call with Carolina), we sent three written clarification questions.
On April 4, we told Carolina about our plan to publish our response on April 10th, noting that we “want to post our response soon since people are likely wondering why we haven’t responded yet.”
Between April 4 and the morning of April 9, we received no replies from Sinergia to any of our emails. We then sent Sinergia the draft article for their review on the morning of April 9, reiterating the planned April 10 publication date.
It was only after receiving the article that Sinergia responded, stating
However, in our email history, no such request was ever made.
We’d also like to note:
We offered to show the article to Sinergia more than 24 hours prior to publication, but Sinergia never told us they wanted this.
Sinergia showed us their response to our review only 24 hours prior to publication, and their response was much longer than our upcoming article.
Vetted Causes is a small, volunteer-run organization. Sinergia is a multimillion-dollar organization with paid staff. If 24 hours was sufficient for our volunteers, we believed it would be fair for Sinergia as well.
That said, we have decided not to post the article today to respect Sinergia’s wishes as reasonably as we can. We are working with them to coordinate a reasonable timeline for publication.
Thanks again for your feedback — we really appreciate it as we continue improving our process.
Here’s the request you’re looking for:
“after reviewing them, we will inform you of the time required to provide our response”.
A couple other points in response:
“If 24 hours was sufficient for our volunteers, we believed it would be fair for Sinergia as well.” feels like a false equivalency. They have many other pressing priorities, and responding to your criticisms takes time and probably knowledge of multiple programmes, which might take time to coordinate.
Some of your email communications came across as pretty hostile (or at least low-trust), and some were friendly and collaborative. I think this might explain some of the differences in how people respond to you. For example, the email before the call where you asked for written consent from all participants seemed like a very low-trust and (if you were already inclined to think that way, as someone who had received critique may be) hostile move. When journalists (who are a good model here) write articles, they often allow interviews ‘on background’ (i.e. interviews where they can use the context they learn, but not name or quote the source). I’d personally recommend that in a case like this—otherwise the interviewee won’t be able to speak freely/ correct themselves etc… in fear of being taken out of context. I think you’ll get a better response from organisations if you adopted more of a vibe of ‘trust but verify’ rather than the current position, which seems to begin by assuming bad faith (whether you actually do or not, this is the vibe).
[edited because I published with half a sentence at the end] Also, wanted to add that again, I’m very glad that you’re responding to the opinions of others on this, and giving Sinergia more time to respond. Thanks again for being open to changing your mind.
Hi Toby, thank you for your reply.
We’re a bit confused, because the quoted statement — “after reviewing them, we will inform you of the time required to provide our response” — does not request anything from us. It simply says Sinergia will do something.
You’re taking their wording too literally. You wrote asking them if 24hr was enough notice, and this response was Sinergia asking if they could instead tell you how long they’d need after reviewing the draft. You don’t have to accept that — you could say you’re not willing to hold off on publishing for more than a week or something — but when you didn’t respond to it Sinergia was right to expect that you wouldn’t drop a draft on them with 24hr notice before publication.
The assumption is that since you are asking for their response, it’s in their court to tell you how long a response would take. Maybe that’s wrong, and you didn’t mind whether or not they had time to send you a response, but that’s the implication of their email.
We think there is a misunderstanding. We never asked Sinergia for a response to our article. We simply told Sinergia we would send them our article before publication.
Maybe I am misunderstanding, I took this email as saying that you were sending them the post before posting in order for them to review, and clarify anything that needs clarifying (I also understand this as the point of sending the article for their review anyway- doesn’t seem like there is much point if they don’t have time to respond?)
The clarifications refers to the 3 clarifying questions we sent (referenced in Email 7):
We didn’t include this image in the list of emails before, but we’ve added it now. Sorry for the confusion!
Stepping back a bit, I note that community norms seem underdeveloped and less clear on one specific fact pattern raised here. I decided to comment on that in hopes of obtaining a bit more clarity. More of this is at an abstract level rather than focused on the VettedCauses / Singeria interaction, although I will refer to it at times.
Conclusion up front: I don’t have a good sense of what norms should apply when the criticized organization and/or the critic need several weeks to prepare responses, but I don’t think they should generally be expected to treat them the same as a new post/criticism.
What Is the Default Norm for Responses and Replies?
The more common pattern, in my recollection, is that an organization will respond to a critical post within days to about a week, and there will often be back and forth between original critic and criticized as part of what we might call the continuing action[1] on the original post. My sense is that community norms do not expect any pre-publication notification for defenses / counter-criticisms that are within the scope of the original post and posted as part of the continuing action on the original post.
That approach makes sense to me. Expecting discussants to delay posting follow-up comments in the continuing action would significantly disrupt the flow of conversation, and it would allow criticisms (either of the organization or of the critic) to stay out there unanswered for longer than necessary. One of the possible rationales for the general notice norm—trying to time response preparation and discussion during a time at which they are less disruptive to key participants—is also less engaged here. The critic chose the time of the posting and thus to some extent when the continuing action would occur. The existence of the post provides the organization with at least notice that there might be continuing action soon, and its submission of a response is often the triggering event for a reply from the original critic. So any further posts in continuing action will at least be less of a blindside that a no-notice post is.
What Norms Should Apply When There Is An Extended Delay Prior to the Organization’s Response?
Here, we have a case in which the organization took a number of weeks to prepare a response / counter-criticism of VettedCauses. That is of course fine! But it means we have a response that was within the scope of the original post but not temporally part of the continuing action. Where the tone of the response is just polite disagreement, I think the continuing-action norm still fits well. However, I would not characterize Singeria’s response in that way—I read it as suggesting that VettedCauses was both unfair and not-very-competent.
Some of the reasons for not expecting notice to the other party for responses still apply here outside the continuing action. However, other considerations trend closer to the reasons for notice prior to an initial post. The authoring organization had several weeks to research and polish its counter-criticism, which creates an imbalance insofar as the critic may feel compelled to rush a reply to protect its reputation (for the same reasons an organization might feel that pressure on an original post). And the timing of when the counter-criticism lands could be rather inconvenient for the critic without advance warning. In my view, the critic has implicitly consented to no-notice countercriticism in the continuing action, but it’s hard to extend that to any arbitrary point in the future.
I think Singeria took a reasonable stance under the facts at hand in giving 24 hours’ advance notice of the response. In the abstract, I’d also like to see more information provided offline about when a response is expected, as well as earlier identification of some key cruxes in an offline communication. Even assuming these things didn’t happen here, I do think VettedCauses made this interaction adversarial earlier in the process, and so I would not fault Singeria for not feeling it could reasonably extend these courtesies. I merely mention them as part of what the process ideally should look like.
What Norms Should Apply to Subsequent Delayed Rounds?
Now, the original critic is about to post their reply to the organization’s response, which is also a response in defense of their research methodology in response to the organization’s criticism. Again, this seems somewhere between a reply in the continuing action and a new post in terms of setting expectations about advance notice and comment. At least in theory, the scope of what the responding organization needs to do should ordinarily diminish with each successive round of interactions. A response or reply is generally directed at the previous discussant’s submission to the conversation. So the surface to be addressed will often be smaller than the surface of an initial post, and the other discussant will have already have done much of the relevant background work in preparing the previous response.
This is an attempted gridiron football analogy; things that flow from the previous play and happen close in time to it are generally considered part of that play for rules-enforcement purposes. Things that are more logically and/or temporally removed are generally enforced separately (“between-downs”).
@Jeff Kaufman 🔸, @Jason, @Toby Tremlett🔹,
Thank you for providing your opinions on this situation. Do you think it is reasonable for us to post our response on April 17? If so, we will notify Sinergia by email.
I think a week from today is a good amount of review time, but I think the key thing is to be clearer in setting expectations in the future.
(I’d also recommend, as I wrote above, apologizing to Sinergia for misunderstanding their earlier request and giving them a very short time to review.)
Again I’d say it depends on whether anything bad happens the longer you wait—I’d personally want to make sure I’d got feedback from Sinergia before I published. Sounds like they are quite happy to look at it with a fairly short turnaround, but my first step would be to send the piece to them and ask them how long they need to properly respond to it.
I think so.
I’d be open to Singeria requesting a further extension based on specific personnel reasons, such as previously planned vacation or illness of a key employee, or particularly significant program commitments (e.g., a key employee is testifying before a national legislature or meeting with a key processor executive soon).
I would apply a lower bar for an extension request than this in most cases. Here, I think VettedCauses does have a moderately significant, case-specific reason to push for promptness—the effect of Singeria’s response to VC’s review on VC’s reputation. That interest is presumably of little importance to Singeria, so it is less likely to weigh it very much in deciding how much time to request.
If you want to understand what expected behavior looks like in these sorts of situations, I would suggest you consider taking a course in journalistic ethics. The industry’s poor reputation for truth seeking is deserved; but there are standards for when and how to seek comment that would serve you well in this context.