Good Intentions 1 Year Blogiversary!

Posted on April 13, 2010 at 2:29 pm

One year ago yesterday I wrote my first blog post. I never intended to become a blogger and rarely spent any time in the blogosphere let alone on twitter. I wouldn’t be writing this post today if it weren’t for a suggestion from Dawn Marano, an editor I’d hired to help with a book proposal.

How Good Intentions got started

I’d recently returned from four years in the thick of the tsunami recovery efforts. During that time I witnessed the good, the bad, and the ugly of aid through the eyes of government officials, villagers, aid workers, and donors. My organization tracked all of the recovery projects in Thailand so we soon became the go-to place for donors, country directors, and researchers to get oriented. I began to realize that many of the bad aid practices causing so many problems were done in an attempt attract and please donors. The donors themselves were completely unaware that the pressures they placed on aid organizations were actually making aid worse.

I returned to the states with the strong belief that aid practices cannot significantly improve until donor practices improve. So I took a year off of work, lived off my savings, enrolled in some writing courses, and wrote a book proposal – three times.

I struggled to put my knowledge and experience into a format that was interesting and usable for donors. This prompted my editor to suggest blogging. Blogging provides immediate feedback, shows you which topics are of the greatest interest, and helps you know your audience. It also creates an amazing professional network with other bloggers and your readers. This past year has been a truly enriching and interesting experience.

How the blog got its name

The working title for my book was Beyond Good Intentions. I choose the title because every time I discussed aid problems with donors they would invariably say, “Well, I’m sure it was done with good intentions” to which I’d always answer “Yes, but the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” I’m obviously not the only person with that thought. I found four books on aid titled Paved with Good Intentions and of course Maren’s The Road to Hell. There’s also a website on aid titled Beyond Good Intentions.

I decided to go with Good Intentions are Not Enough, a title which has resonated with aid workers. There were several occasions when my blog was linked to by other blogs simply because someone was trying to drive home the point not only are good intentions not enough but there are so many problems caused by good intentions that there’s an entire blog dedicated to that fact.

Fighting bad donor advice

Over the past year I’ve taken other writers to task when they’ve provided the same bad donor advice that led to all the problems I encountered in the field. In May of last year, just a month after I began blogging, I took on the Wall Street Journal. This post launched me into the blogosphere when both Aid Watch and the Chronicle of Philanthropy picked
it up.

I’ve also taken on Nicholas Kristoff twice, the second time netting me both a tweet and a response from Kristoff on his blog. And finally, my four page diatribe on all of the problems with the Huffington Post’s Impact section garnered me an invitation to blog for them. Unfortunately I seem to have had no impact on the overall quality of the section.

Reader feedback led to The Charity Rater

Reader feedback has been one of the best things about blogging. I appreciate hearing what I’m doing well, what’s not so great, and how I can reach more donors. And I’ll admit it, I do enjoy getting fan mail as well, who wouldn’t.

The idea for The Charity Rater came from my readers. Six months after I began blogging they let me know that while they appreciated the knowledge they gained from my posts, when it actually came to sitting down and choosing an aid organization the information was too scattered and they didn’t know where to start. The Charity Rater was developed to walk individual donors through a step by step process to help them evaluate the charity themselves.

The rating system would not have been possible without the help of fellow aid bloggers who provided invaluable suggestions and feedback in the development stage. Several of my readers have also volunteered their time and professional expertise to provide feedback and advice that has helped me simplify the tool and make it more user friendly. Thanks to everyone for your wonderful assistance. And for those of you that haven’t tried rating a charity in a while I’d love it if you’d try it again and let me know what you think.

The growth of the smart giving movement

I’m really pleased to be part of a community of people working to educate and empower donors. This led me to nominate the smart giving movement in AidWatch’s Best of Aid competition. I’m happy to say my nomination won and AidWatch did a nice job of compiling many of the smart giving initiatives in their Best of Aid post. The more we all speak up the greater the chance that our voices will begin to overpower all the bad donor advice out there.

Reaching more donors

While the number of subscribers to my blog steadily grows each month, the plethora of news articles singing the praises of questionable aid projects in Haiti showed that the smart giving movement is still not reaching a wide enough audience. This led me to approach GiveWell about creating a weekly radio program in hopes of reaching more people. We posted our third podcast today on Think Before You Give and we are pursuing potential partnerships to help us professionally record and syndicate the program to radio stations in major metropolitan areas. Keep your fingers crossed.

The book proposal

Not long after I started blogging I stopped working on the book proposal. I’d received several rejection letters and couldn’t bring myself to edit it one more time. I recently reread the proposal and now see why no agent was interested. This past year of blogging has taught me so much about who my audience is, what they want to know, and how to make the complicated world of aid understandable to those that don’t spend their lives in the thick of it. While I still falter from time to time, overall I feel I’m a better writer and communicator because of blogging. I hope to submit a new and improved proposal to agents this summer.

What’s in store for Good Intentions 2nd year?

Expect to see fewer posts this next year. I need to devote more time to other pursuits and believe that one post a week is all the average donor really wants anyway.

I’ve begun applying for consultancy positions and look forward to getting back out into the field and interacting with aid workers, government officials, and aid recipients once again. I also look forward to having fresh experiences and perspectives to share.

When I’m not blogging or doing consultancies I plan to:

• Pursue the radio syndication of Think Before You Give
• Improve and expand The Charity Rater
• Rewrite the book proposal – one more time
• Speak at university campuses and meet with students as they prepare to enter the world as aid workers or donors.
• Create a tool to help nonprofit boards and management evaluate their practices and transparency.

This past year has been both amazing and busy and the year ahead is shaping up to be much the same. I hope I have the chance to meet many of you in person either out in the field or on college campuses. In the mean time keep your suggestions, feedback, and fan mail coming.

Best,

Saundra

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