Hi! I am a street drawing artist. I usually work on art craft markets or touristic centers. I was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil and moved to Portugal in 2011. Before entering the art field I used to work in the computer industry (troubleshooting, some programming, etc). You can see some of my drawings in my Instagram: @cesar.scapella.
Cesar Scapella
Karma: 20
Hi Brad, I am reading some of your posts that talk about Consumer Economy so I can familiarize myself with the concepts… this will take a while since yours writings are a bit loooooooooong.
I will get back to you soon...
Hi Sawyer, I looked at your transparency page and I believe that it is somewhat satisfactory for the kind of people who are familiar with the nonprofit structure.
For a potential donor who is totally unfamiliar with the organization and also does not live in the US, they may find it difficult to navigate and understand.
For example:
People outside of US (and probably some people living in the US) may not be satisfied with IRS 990 filings as they may not know how they should interpret that information (myself included) and how much importance they should give to it (in the context of transparency).
There are other documents, for example one called “ByLaws”, which, again, for a non-US person (or US people who are not familiar with those docs) they can’t judge the importance of such document for the transparency of an organization.
Alright, all of this is not exactly a criticism, especially if your organization is only focused on the US audience for donations and contributions.
As to the annual reports I think it is a positive sign that they contain a lot of information. I would suggest though it would make for a more friendly transparent page if some key information was summarized in a neat table of contents shown at the top of the page like: salary of each team member, total donations received per month or year, how much spent (on what), etc., so that someone from outside could have some overall idea of what is going on before they dig deeper on those more technical and dense PDFs.
A note: it is probably there in the annual reports or 990 files, but I couldn’t easily find info about team members and directors salary. I think that is crucial information to be found buried inside PDFs. I know that is a minor thing but if you take a look at the transparency page of Buffer you will have a good illustration of what I am imagining.
I conclude by saying that your page is probably satisfactory for someone well versed in how nonprofit work, its financials, IRS files, etc (and also have a good 30 minutes to sit down and read). Not friendly for the lay people, I have to say.
But again, this would be irrelevant if the lay public is not your target audience or the main source of donations.
Hi Zachary,
Yes! I am aware that AMF is considered one of the best examples of transparency in the EA Community. I already glanced at it before but I will now take a closer look at their page. They definitely show a higher standard of transparency when compared to other organizations but I am still not sure they provide what can be called true transparency (one that could be independently verifiable and does not demand faith based trust).
But I may be wrong. I don’t have enough information to build strong conclusions yet… that is why I will spend some time reading their website and hopefully, if I have time, I will share my findings here.
Thanks.
Hi Brad, I am just not certain about how the lay public will react to this formula...
If I advertise that my shop will be donating 100% to charity, a lay person will very likely get the notion that the owner is not receiving any money. It may seem naive for us who are familiar with philanthropy, but I try to put myself in the shoes of the lay public.
In this case, I think they would be quite disappointed to find out that I will be actually getting a “lot of money” and it is not really a 100% which goes to charity and they react “Wow, I didn’t expect that”. Putting myself as operational cost is not going to help, I think… Any reasonable person will catch the trick and be disappointed.
So, what I want with the Effective Drawing project is a shop that uses not potential misleading words or numbers that may confuse the public. I want things to be very simple and truthful.
I believe that advertising a donation of 51% is not a bad strategy as the lay public will know upfront that I am indeed receiving some money and they can’t form wrong expectations. Moreover, they can easily find and understand the ceiling (which will be announced everywhere) and with that in mind they can easily see that after a certain point, 100% of profits will be donated to charity, everything verifiable in the deep transparency page.
Though I am hesitant to re-frame how I advertise donations, I would still be happy to participate in one of your projects somehow. I think one way to advertise how I donate which is closer to what you suggest while still being truthful to the reality behind my shop, would be to say that “This shop donates 51% (up to 100%) to human causes”. That would not run the risk of being misleading because that is exactly what is going to happen in reality.
Please tell me your thoughts about this, Brad… and thanks for your engagement.
Cheers!
Child questions about core aspects of philanthropy
Hi Brad, could you elaborate a bit more on this performance-based compensation. I kind of understand it overall but I am not sure what would be the formula to execute it in the real scenario.
Also, please talk a bit more about how this Charitable Profits Alliance works and how would my project fit in there.
Thanks for your analysis and constructive comments.
Thanks Agustín!
I like your thorough analysis Larissa… I would love to have your critique on my project:
A Shop where 51% of profits are spent with good causes
Thanks
Hi @Brad West.
I was going to answer, burner, but Brad West pretty much explained it very well...
Advertising to prospective buyers that the shop will donate 51% of profits is in fact one strategy to earn more money.
Hi, I have been working to improve the foundations of this project so I finally acquired a proper website, which is:
The website mentioned in the post no longer works.
Thanks!
Yes! I took a look at his website and indeed it is an interesting project. As I understood, he devotes about 10 hours work to a portrait when a person does a donation to AMF and then he delivers the print of that custom gouache painting. He takes nothing from it, that is impressive…
Thanks for sharing...
Good article… Now I laugh (at me).
I just posted an announcement of a project of mine here just a few days before I found your article (I wish I found it before). Now I can see what a dumb choice to call my project “Effective Drawing”. I was suspecting something was wrong...
I think I will have to change it again (laughs)… This time I hope to be the last one, for God sake.
Thanks for sharing good knowledge...
I like it!