👋 Hi PH, I have often thought about how I can do my bit to help make a difference, to somehow better the lives of those less fortunate than me. The obvious solution was to turn to the people already doing this, charity. But the problem I found is that it just isn't easy to know where I should donate my money so that it actually makes an impact for the cause I'm supporting. You hear tale after tale of money being eaten up by huge admin costs and little about how charities are actually making a difference. 🛠 Solution Ella is a tool that helps to sort the good charities from the not-so-good, by combining a breakdown of a charity's income and expenditure into clear & obvious categories and crowdsourcing public perception of a charity. So now if you're undecided about where to give, you can turn to data and the view of others to help you make that decision. 👉 Features - Learn about a charitable cause, the problems, solutions, and the charities working on it. - Search for a charity or cause by name or keyword - Quick view charity trust scores and key metrics - View a breakdown of a charity's income and expenditure for their most recent financial year - View historical income and expenditure information for the past five years - View crowdsourced ratings of how the general public feels about a charity - Contribute your own scores to a charity 🙏 Let me know what you think! I'm keen to make Ella into a really useful tool not only for supporters, but for charities too.

This is great, where are you getting these data?

Love it! Looks awesome - just a couple questions: any thoughts on 1. integrating with givewell data/other charity rating orgs? 2. would love a "I'm feeling lucky" button that takes you to a random good charity. Keep up the good work!

Looks clean af! I've seen the amount of work you put in, and its looking insanely good! Keep smashing it!

This is pretty great. I remember using several sites like this for different campaigns since you want to vet the org your contributions go to. I like that you lay out the source info right at the top before the charts. One question I have is why the public opinion option meters? A lot of these issues can be hindered by biased view points whether that bias is coming from a compassionate or hateful place. A good example would be Prop 8 here in CA back in 2008. I campaigned heavily for it only after several org meetings for LGBTQ immigrants who knew that the gay marriage issue was a middle class white American one and the community is much more racially segregated than the general population. On one had this was good for advancement on the other hand this siphoned literally millions of dollars away from issues that were immediately affecting QTPOC (Queer and Trans People of Color), Queer immigrants, Trans activism, LGBTQ youth who make up a heartbreakingly disproportionate amount of homeless you and so on. After a lot of infighting POC LGBTQ orgs joined ranks and there’s pictures of me holding the front line sign and leading my favorite marching chat. The advancement for the community was more important in that moment but 1) there would have been internal disagreements let alone that we lost that fight because of podunk inland CA and that cesspool of LA rejects known as OC. Lo and behold you know had mega donor A-list celebrity photo-op dinners with politicians and the Human Rights Campaign lead by.... rich, upper class white gay men. The exact same thing happened with ENDA. Except we held ground with a lot of white folks too. A faction wanted the ENDA Democrats (😒) said wasn’t the only version they could get through Congress. The one that left the T of LGBT. We knew workplace protections for Trans folks would basically be impossible without the public support the whole community was receiving because the T was never the focus in these middle-upper class white male led organizations. We said let the bill die. All of us or none of us. We won and the bill lost. No ENDA ever without Trans-inclusion because a trans woman threw that brick not some white twink. Point being. There’s a lot of layers to community and charity work and a public... opinion? Temperature gauge?... seems out of place in an otherwise nice addition to resources out there right now for auditing charitable orgs and assessing their “worthiness.” Id suggest to remove any future complications, I’d remove it entirely. It’s not Yelp for Charities afterall it’s more of a wiki for charities.

Great work!

Pros:

Very useful page for the ones who are not sure about how trustworthy NGOs can be. Love the financial info!

Cons:

All the ratings are the same. I believe it needs more user activity

Ah this is great!! I’ve been looking for something like to use in tandem with a service I run to give users more confidence in choosing a charity that speaks not only to their personal values but also to societal ones. Two questions: 1) I’m guessing you guys are focusing more on the UK market; what are your plans (if any) for other markets, like, say, the U.S. one? 2) Any thoughts about exposing an API? Would love to query a nonprofit and return a “reputability” score. There’s a few APIs out there that assign some arbitrary score, but I have no idea how or why that value came to be. Y’all seem more transparent.

Great design and good idea to get an idea of what charities are up to.

Upvoted right away! Love the idea! Thanks for implementing it.

This is bonkers. And all the comments on this thread ("you're crushing it!") are a great example of how the tech community has no idea what they're talking about when it's outside their wheelhouse, and how "disrupting" can go way off the rails when it's a solution in search of a problem. Public opinion ratings should no bearing on which nonprofits people support. If the past two years has taught us anything, it's that these kinds of open rating systems are the target of – and incredibly susceptible to – interference. Whether it's brigading through the front door, or hacking through the back door, rating systems can be easily manipulated for nefarious purposes. Beyond simple manipulation is the more basic problem that the public opinion of a charity is not reflective of the kind of work that an organization is doing. For example, an organization might have a terrible website and donation experience, but if they get the vast majority of their funding from a foundation, then their site and donation experience is not particularly important. They can be "crushing" awesome program work and have very little interaction with small dollar donors. And I wonder, how will organizations that are doing the grindingly hard work of fighting discrimination against the Muslim community going to fare in this rating system when we know that mosques all over the English-speaking world are vandalized on a daily basis? How will organizations that support civil disobedience for immigration justice fare when they shut down a major highway? Lots of charities doing important, difficult work are under constant threat of violence and abuse – now they also have to worry about their Ella rating? 🙄 The most insane part of this public opinion metric is that Ella could actually draw time, effort, and money away from good program work to deal with negative ratings. Suddenly nonprofits are subject to the same whims as Yelp listings, except that nonprofits have a completely different model and therefore have far fewer levers to influence the ratings. Beyond all that, though, these ratings metrics are just ridiculous. "Repeat donation pestering"? Hilarious that Ella uses the eye-roll emoji for this, considering how ProductHunt is basically built on the idea that a monthly SaaS subscription is the stairway to heaven, and every month we get one or two new guides on how to create a SaaS subscription service, or maximize subscription revenue every month. Every entrepreneur on this site is looking for a way to get customers on a subscription model and Ella is sending the signal to its users that this very model when applied to nonprofits, repeat donations, which are the most effective way for nonprofits to gather and maintain small-dollar funding – are problematic when you're "pestered" about them. What does that even mean? Is a checkbox on the donation form "pestering"? Is a popup "pestering"? Is a follow-up email thanking you for your donation and then asking you to commit to a monthly donation "pestering"? How would we know, since Ella provides no guidance. Howabout this other one, "Marketing Junk"? Ella's asking for charities to be transparent and then it's discouraging nonprofits from providing user-friendly content about how they're winning? How do people think that charities actually raise money? Direct mail and email are the backbone of any nonprofit's small-dollar donation program. The simplistic inflow-vs-outflow metric is utterly useless to a casual viewer. For example, after the election of Donald Trump, ACLU raised tens of millions of dollars. There's no way they could spend that money within two months, let alone a year. Instead, they're building a long-term plan for engaging millions of Americans on the subject of civil liberties. None of that would be clear from this metric. And the metric is not even explained to the user on the charity page on Ella! This site shows a real ignorance about how nonprofits work. I really wonder if the makers even talked to anyone who works at nonprofits before launching this site? I have a hard time believing that any nonprofit would have steered the makers of this toward this direction. I wish that people on ProductHunt would look beyond site design or high-level concepts and start taking a critical eye to what we see here. The fact that this ended up #3 for the day it was launched boggles my mind.