Organizations of public benefit: performance evaluation using MCDA approach

Abstract

In many countries, organizations of public benefit play an important role inthe economy and are established only for charitable purposes. Serving the public interest is often connected with certain benefits, such as additional source of revenue, tax advantages or state grants, but also certain obligations, such as guaranteeing trustworthiness and transparency of operations. Taking the role of charities and voluntary organizations into consideration there is a great need to assess properly such entities whereas tools indicated for corporate finance are not appropriate since these units are established for purposes other than profit-making. Moreover, their range of activities is very different. Hence, new assessment methods are needed in order to evaluate them properly. For this reason the main aim of this paper is to propose and apply multi-criteria decision aiding (MCDA) approach to the problem of assessment of organizations of public benefit. The proposed procedure using EVAMIX method for mixed evaluations (deterministic and stochastic) has been employed in the process of appraising and ranking nine Public Benefit Organizations (PBOs) from one of Polish voivodships operating in the field of ‘Ecology, animals and heritage protection’, and eight charities from two neighboring English metropolitan boroughs, operating in the field of ‘Animals’. Rankings of these entities havebeen obtained so that, e.g., a potential donator would have a better base to make his or her decision regarding financial support.