Though it may be more hashtag than holiday, #GivingTuesday is a reminder to re-up commitments to charity in a season saturated with consumerism. Like it or not, the hashtag has taken hold. But, instead of simply opening your wallet to this year’s flurry of appeals, take a moment to assess your favorite causes and consider new ones. You might find that nonprofits are looking less and less like their old selves. Here’s why that’s both good and bad for the third sector.

Giving Tuesday is trending, but the word “nonprofit” seems like it’s going out of style. While many organizations rely on the 501(c)(3) or (4) designation to lend their causes credibility — and, of course, tax-exempt status — more and more are distancing themselves from that label. With the advent of social entrepreneurship and other alternatives to the traditional charity model, “nonprofit” not only seems passé, but represents an outmoded, inefficient way of operating.

Granted, recent data show that giving is on the rise. Still, the social sector is plagued by horror stories of corruption, obscene overhead, lack of transparency, and dubious impact. Just ask Clinton or Rubio. CharityWatch, a site that rates and scrutinizes nonprofits, even has a Hall of Shame reserved for the bad eggs that, they say, “inspire our work.”

As with most scandals, some of the finger-pointing can be dismissed as media hype or guilt by association. That’s not to say that watchdogs should stand down. Devious and inept non-profiteers do exist and they should be ousted. However, nonprofits as a whole, and the public that supports or scorns them, should focus on rethinking how organizations committed to social missions get the job done.

The names we give things do matter. They effect expectations from within and without. Even so, rebranding nonprofits is not enough. Replacing yesterday’s tarnished vocabulary with buzzwords like “for-purpose” (the brainchild of Adam Braun, Founder & CEO of Pencils of Promise) will only influence organizational culture and convince donors if substantial change comes with it.

So what should nonprofits do to regain public trust and maximize their impact?

Enter the startup nonprofit.

These nonprofit pioneers demonstrate how entrepreneurial spirit and tech savvy can lead to growth and impact.

The most successful startup nonprofits empower everyday donors. They enable anyone, regardless of their means, to give easily and see their donation do good in short order. Donorschoose.org and Watsi, for example, have harnessed crowdfunding to bridge the gap between donors and those in need. Their online giving platforms are user-friendly, scalable, open to A/B testing, and deliver a valuable product — their mission’s intended impact — to donors through photos of their dollars at work, smart email marketing, and transparency efforts.

Crowdfunding isn’t new. Since it appeared in the mid-2000’s, a growing number of nonprofits have built variations of it (including, for full disclosure, Wishbone.org, where I currently work) as a more sustainable, democratic approach to fundraising.

Nonetheless, the experience remains refreshing for anyone who has struggled with clunky charity websites or wondered about what, exactly, their dollars had done to help the anonymous child pictured on a yearly mailing. It just works.

Making it easy is important, but making a connection is critical. According to Giving USA, of the $358 billion Americans gave last year, 72% were from individuals who, on the whole, tend to give to organizations near and dear to them. An ethicist would call this specialized altruism. It’s a simple enough idea — we prefer to aid someone we know, even if rationality tells us we can do more for a stranger far away. Letting do-gooders virtually meet people they can actually help is a truly awesome example of leveraging the convenience and connectivity of modern technology for social good.

These nonprofit wunderkinds also raise capital like startups. A seed round of funding covers operational costs for Watsi (a Y Combinator alum). This and optional “tips” allow Watsi to guarantee 100% of donations go directly to providing healthcare for the underserved patients on their site. For other orgs, cause marketing turns a donation or partnership into an investment for companies looking to boost their corporate social responsibility. No matter how they do it, startup nonprofits make it simple for donors to distinguish what goes to programs and what keeps the org’s lights on.

Most importantly, these startups come up with new solutions, test them, and can pivot to a new approach, or even mission, if they fail. They get stuff done. For them, impact is everything. Without it, elegant donor-facing UX is just hollow infrastructure.

Such exemplars validate the idea that those looking to revolutionize the nonprofit sector have valuable lessons to learn from tenacious for-profit innovators.

Seems like today’s the day to think big and tackle hard social problems, right? Right!

But, there are limits to the startup vision. Not all nonprofits can be disruptors. So, before you divert all your giving to nonprofit startups or found your own, consider this:

Some social good takes time and can’t be converted into neat units of measure.

Emphasizing immediate ROI can mean more gets done more efficiently. This is a hallmark of Effective Philanthropy, getting (statistically significant) bang for your buck. This mantra has driven the success of a variety of forward-thinking ventures. But, it can also put detrimental strain on nonprofits whose objectives take longer to reach or are harder to measure.

Take, for example, the argument made by Jordan Levy, Chief External Relations Officer at the Ubuntu Education Fund. After his organization spent its foundational years focusing on “overselling” results, they decided to concentrate instead on long-term, comprehensive impact for one community, Port Elizabeth, South Africa. “Rather than expand geographically,” he writes, “we chose to focus on depth, measuring success in terms of outcomes rather than outputs.” It took some convincing to get funders on board, and some jumped ship in search of “bigger, faster, and cheaper” causes — “low-hanging fruit,” as one donor put it.

Monitoring and evaluation should absolutely be a robust part of any nonprofit’s work. And, yes, donors need to accept that this can take more time and money than they expect. These expenses should not be seen as goods stolen from the target population, but chances to assess and improve the help it delivers.

The public also needs to acknowledge that some worthy causes won’t wow us with numbers. Some impact just can’t be easily quantified.

If we pressure otherwise responsible nonprofits to mark their performance with hard data when they can’t, we might end up with more charities that juke stats or overstate the good they do. We should prefer an honest, humble charity over one that boasts of output it can’t own with integrity.

Not all solutions are scalable.

Big ideas are exciting. They can breathe new life — and not to mention money — into otherwise withering attempts to fix pervasive problems. And yet, the same problem can have vastly different causes in different contexts. A solution that works without a hitch at first may languish over time or face unforeseen obstacles with a different target population.

Slowing down enough to evaluate whether a new fix works outside its beta test isn’t sexy. Drawing on a variety of cases where sweeping international development projects went awry, Michael Hobbes makes this very point:

It’s not that you test something in one place, then scale it up to 50. It’s that you test it in one place, then test it in another, then another. No one will ever be invited to explain that in a TED talk.

Promising new ideas should still thrill us. We just need to check that enthusiasm enough to allow nonprofits the chance to work collaboratively with target populations to gauge a model’s effectiveness there. And, if they find that expansion would have null or damaging effects on the lives and communities of those they would serve, we should applaud the nonprofit that zeroes in on what it does well. “Scaling up” doesn’t have to mean “scaling out.”

Nonprofits with social missions are nothing without the trust of potential donors and the communities they aim to support. To earn that confidence, charities can’t just slap new names (or hashtags) on old business models. Startups offer flexible, hackable, and impactful blueprints for nonprofits to adapt. But, those only looking for silicon bullets may be disappointed in the end.