How To Be Great At Doing Good: Why Results Are What Count and How Smart Charity Can Change the World
by Nick Cooney
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Description
"Turns out much of the advice we've been given about how to make the world a better place turns out to be dead wrong. Donating to certain charities will do thousands of times more good that donating to others. Non-profits that choose to carry out one program instead of another will be hundreds of times less successful than they could be, regardless of how bright, hard-working, and compassionate their staff may be.The majority of Americans are involved in charitable work. Most of us donate. show more Many of us volunteer. Millions go to work each day at a non-profit organization. By taking a more rigorous, calculated approach to charity, we can learn how to do dramatically more good. We can learn how to truly change the world.This book shows you how. Drawing on fifteen years of non-profit experience, a working knowledge of thousands of academic studies on what drives charitable and behavioral decisions, interviews with non-profit and philanthropy professionals, and years of reading, writing, and lecturing on how to effectively bring about social change.The first book to address how a whole host of psychological and social factors combine to drive us toward making bad charitable decisions, its unique content and frank approach will help it stand out in the field of non-profit and philanthropy books. "-- show lessTags
Member Reviews
For what it's worth, I went into Nick Cooney's How To Be Great At Doing Good really wanting to like it; it's not only a passionate argument for why all of us should be more regular contributors of time and money to charities, but also a practical guide to figuring out which of two competing charities is more worth our time and money, a crucial part of philanthropy that I feel is missing in most people's lives. But my God, talk about the most egregious example I've ever seen of book-padding -- this is not just a magazine article padded out to the length of a book, but literally a blog post padded out to one, with only half a dozen lines of real, practical information buried within 270 pages of the most fillerific filler you will ever show more see. (For one very typical example, Cooney spends two entire pages telling us about a recent skiing trip he attended, just to make the point that deciding which charity to give money to is much like standing at the top of a ski slope and looking down at the treacherous run.) Plus, Cooney has a habit of making sweeping generalizations about charities, based on his personal opinions, that I didn't care for (he glibly declares at one point, for example, that all medical charities are inherently "worthier" than all arts charities, because fixing things that are wrong with the world is inherently nobler than adding something that didn't previously exist); and he also uses the book as an excuse to nitpick at charities he doesn't care for (he spends an entire chapter, for example, explaining why the Make-A-Wish Foundation shouldn't spend their money granting wishes), the exact kind of know-it-all do-gooder tsk-tsking that turns so many people off the entire idea of charity to begin with. Certainly Cooney's heart is in the right place, but this book is easily skippable, whose practical information can be completely and entirely summed up with, "Look at a charity's administrative costs closely before deciding to give them money."
Out of 10: 2.5 show less
Out of 10: 2.5 show less
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3 Works 94 Members
Nick Cooney is the founder of The Humane League, a farm animal protection organization based in Philadelphia, PA. He is the author of Change of Heart: What Psychology Can Teach Us About Spreading Social Change. His work for animals has been featured in hundreds of media outlets including Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and National Public show more Radio. show less
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, Economics, Business, Sociology, Politics and Government
- DDC/MDS
- 361.7068 — Society, Government, and Culture Social problems and social services Social problems and services Private Charity & Philanthropy
- LCC
- HV40 .C667 — Social sciences Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Social service. Social work. Charity
- BISAC
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- 14
- Popularity
- 1,672,608
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.33)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
