Microfinance Statistics

• Why do you think expert opinion is so important?
  
  We believe that evaluating nonprofit effectiveness is very challenging. However, there are professionals who are well-suited to assess nonprofit impact. Experts, such as foundation professionals, academics, and nonprofit executives have access to unique and non-public data about nonprofit performance. In addition, these experts are best-suited to interpret these data through advanced models for nonprofit effectiveness. Therefore, we rely on experts to identify which organizations they think are strongest.
• Who are your experts? How do you find them? What do you look for?
  
  Our experts represent a broad range of professionals working in a particular sector. We are interested in the perspectives of foundation professionals, academics, nonprofit executives and employees, researchers, journalists, politicians, and others. We aim to build an expert network with a balanced representation of professionals from all of these fields, with diverse geographical representation, and with diverse areas of expertise. We target experts in a social cause through a combination of cold emails and warm referrals (on the basis of professional and personal connections). We try to identify as many experts as possible to invite them to join the network. When experts fill out our survey, we collect information to confirm the strength and diversity of our expert network. We ask experts how many years they have been working in their field, what professional affiliations and/or academic background they have in the field, what their professional title is and who their employer is, and, we ask them to rank themselves on an expertise scale of 1-5 where 5 is “most” expert.
• If you allow nonprofit executives to participate, how do you ensure those experts don’t “vote” for themselves?
  
  We believe nonprofit executives have an important perspective on nonprofit effectiveness and we value their insights. However, we do not allow any expert (nonprofit executive or others) to mention their own organization and we double check every survey response to ensure that there is no “self-voting.”