Determine How Good Your Charity Actually Is: Charity Navigator Is A Cool Tool!
Even during the current worldwide economic instability, most everyone would like to be able to donate to charity and help out others. But just as educated consumers consider the corporate philosophies of big businesses, it is also wise to educate yourself about charities to which you donate. While a charity will always try to put the most positive spin on themselves in order to solicit donations, objective criteria should be used to determine whether a charity is worthy of your donation or not. For that, there is Charity Navigator.
Charity Navigator is an Internet site that provides information on charities, much the same way Open Secrets provides information on political donations. Evaluating objectively using records supplied to the government for tax/accounting purposes, Charity Navigator uses a series of consistent criteria to evaluate the health of a charity. This allows you to both compare charities and view charities that come close to an ideal using Charity Navigator.
Charity Navigator first looks at the total income of a charity. This allows the site to determine if the charity is healthy in that it has people who want to contribute to it and enough capital to meet its operating expenses. Charity Navigator can be very useful in this regard as it contains both the current ratings of a charity and historical evaluations by the site. If the total income is going down, you may want to consider donating elsewhere as the future of that charity may well be in question! Conversely, if a charity continues to show growth each year in its overall income, you might make the reasonable assumption that it is getting stronger and (hopefully) more effective.
Perhaps the most useful aspect of Charity Navigator is the inclusion of statistics involving the operating expenses and fundraising expenses of every listed charity. If you are donating to a particular cause, you want the money to go to the cause, not to a CEO’s inflated salary. Charity Navigator illustrates, in clear numbers in a uniform form for every charity, what percentage of the budget a charity spent on the cause, the administrative fees, and fundraising. Using the charts on Charity Navigator, you can see exactly how efficient any given charity is. Popularity does not equate to efficiency. So, for example, the Muscular Dystrophy Association spends a whopping 14.5% of its annual budget on fundraising (ideally, you want all expenses to be under ten percent of a charity’s budget). While “Helping Jerry’s Kids” is a noble idea, the MDA does not service the programs it supports as well as it ought to.
Donating to charity is a deeply personal thing that is usually based on emotion. For whatever cause you are passionate about, there is a charity raising money. Charity Navigator may help you make the most rational decision about where you are donating your money, so you may do the most good!
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