Welcome to the next stage of ChangePath

Welcome to ChangePath, Australia’s only charity rating organisation. We’re launching a lot of big changes today (including, in a metatextual twist, the blog this is being written on), but before I outline those let’s talk about what ChangePath is.

ChangePath exists, at a basic level, to help Australian donors and charities find each other. We’re here to help people who want to donate, but aren’t sure who to.

Aside
I should note, at this point, that ChangePath isn’t about finding the absolutely most effective way to donate funds to save lives. For that, we’d recommend GiveWell, Giving What We Can or The Life You Can Save, which assess charities worldwide to figure out exactly which ones are most effective. On that note, ChangePath is a rating organisation, not a ranking one. The distinction is subtle, but effectively we’re not here to pick the ‘best charity’, rather we just want to show that some charities are more transparent than others.

ChangePath fills a niche for those of us that want to donate to a particular cause in Australia, but aren’t sure how to go about it. Or perhaps you want to find out more about a charity you might want to donate to. ChangePath is here to give you confidence that the organisation you’re giving to is transparent, financially well-managed, and will keep your personal information safe. For charities, we help those that are well-run to stand out from the pack and promote their good virtues.

What’s changed

To help achieve this, we’ve launched a whole range of changes to the way ChangePath works, ranging from the cosmetic to the fundamental. Here’s a quick rundown:

• 300 more charities listed, with more to come.
• Charities now have four years of financial information (where available), including expenses, assets and liabilities.
• We’re now giving ratings on financial management and privacy. They’re fairly easy to pass – don’t lose too much money, have enough assets to pay for your expenses in hard times, and have more than you owe.
• You can now donate to ChangePath. Why would you do that? You’ll need to look at the donate page to find out.
• We’ve launched a bunch of new content including this blog, a page for charities, a media page, and a revamped home page.

And they’re just the big changes. We’ve also launched a host of little ones like tags, charity groupings, linking to ACNC listings, and a revamped transparency rating. ChangePath, when it launched, was very much a proof of concept. It did exactly what it needed to do and no more. With this new version, we’re much closer to the full functionality of what the site should have.

Onwards and upwards

Of course, we’re not done. There’s a lot that still can be done to help donors, and we have a range of interesting ideas on how to improve our reporting. Aside from the obvious imperative of always staying up-to-date, we have a number of plans for how we can measure new parameters, do more interesting data analysis, and create a better snapshot of charity performance. We’ll talk about those in a future blog post.

I’d like to thank our board, who have done a lot to help ChangePath get off the ground and have been invaluable as we move from a fun idea to a fully-fledged assessment engine.

What do you think of the new ChangePath? We’re leaving comments open (for the moment), so feel free to have your say.