kathgrr replied to your post “nightsgrow replied to your post “nightsgrow: Am I misremembering or is...”
Hi Sam, Can you explain why you don't like Charity Navigator? I was told they were a good indicator by one NGO during a financial report/presentation?
We have come full circle! The post that started all this is here, and explains why I don’t find Charity Navigator a good site to recommend to people who don’t understand its full scope. But let’s dig into it!
For NGOs, for people who know exactly what CN does and does not do, yes, it can be useful -- especially for finances, because it summarizes the org’s financial situation. But a lot of people who are outside the charitable world just go to the site, look at the star rating, and use that as an evaluation of a charity, when it’s not always indicative of a good place to give. And some NGOs, particularly those with high star ratings, will recommend Charity Navigator because it’s easier than explaining the nuances of how the charitable sector works and because they know if they say “you have to do the research yourself” it will put people off in the short run. And they want donors. Which I get, so do I. But Charity Navigator pretty much stops at financials a lot of the time.
SOAPBOX AHEAD.
Because of that focus on basic financials and on rewarding money spent on services versus money spent on overhead, it reinforces a mindset that I’d like to see die, which is that charities shouldn’t spend money on overhead because every dollar spent on someone’s salary is a dollar less that goes to someone in need. It’s not; it’s a dollar still spent helping that person-in-need in a less visible way, by building infrastructure. People who work for NGOs deserve fair pay regardless of the source of the money, and high turnover (particularly in upper management) is like high turnover anywhere: bad for business, bad for the workers, bad for the clients of the organization. Charities that put more of their money into hiring and keeping better workers provide better service to both their clients and their donors, but it’s difficult to project that in a financial report.
I know this because I live it. I work at a nonprofit with some of the highest salaries for my field in the entire state, and the result has been that we -- my department in specific, the ten or twelve people I work the most closely with -- are at the cutting edge of our specific field not just in Chicago but nationwide. More generally, my org is consistently in the top ten for fundraising and top twenty for client services (depends on how you’re measuring client services; sometimes we’re in the top ten or top five for specific aspects of it) out of several hundred orgs who do what we do. My office has very low turnover and a high return rate -- people who leave our org often return within a few years because we just offer a better experience for our employees.
So to provide the best services to the clients, you have to have good people who are paid well and given decent working conditions. Charity Navigator is not great at indicating that. To be fair, it’s something that’s very hard to show without having a personal relationship with every single org in the country, which isn’t really feasible. The day will come when big data will be able to help us with this, but until then, you just have to do the legwork yourself.
