There are over 10 million digitized 990 images available and details on 2 million US based charities, best of all - the service is free. They are plugged into 4 primary data sources, the IRS, The Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), The Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) and the non-profit organization themselves. is dedicated to donor education and awareness while simultaneously supporting all nonprofit organizations by providing them with an open platform to tell their side of the story. I would like to bring to your attention an organization that is quickly emerging in the nonprofit reporting sector with new and innovative technologies. I would even venture to say that their technologies are built on dated platforms at this point and would require a significant investment to modernize. Your experience may be different from mine.Īs you mention in your article, these organizations evaluate less than 1% of the charities in this country and do very little to support the remaining 99%. I would love to hear what our readers think on these issues. You can learn a lot this way that the national “watchdogs” can’t possibly duplicate. I would also try to find people who had direct personal experience with them. I would carefully review the charities’ websites, review their 990s personally, and do a computer search on the publicity they have generated and received. But if I were prospecting for your type of business, or for a place to make a donation, I wouldn’t use any one of them alone as a litmus test. GuideStar generally doesn’t rate charities, and state charitable solicitation regulators almost never say anything more about a charity than the numbers they received from the charities themselves.īoth Charity Navigator and the Wise Giving Alliance give ratings that, if bad, could seriously undercut the credibility of your prospective clients. One significant advantage of Charity Navigator and Wise Giving Alliance is that they can warn donors about questionable issues with a specific organization. In fact, they all said, many charities should be spending more on overhead to give themselves a greater capacity to pursue their missions. But both rely heavily on ratios from the 990s for program service expenses, fundraising costs, and general administrative overhead, however, and reduce the ratings of charities that fail to meet their criteria.ĭespite the significance of the ratios in their rating systems, they joined with GuideStar a few years ago to urge the donating public to disregard the “overhead myth” that a low percentage of expenses for administration or fundraising is necessary for a good performance. Wise Giving Alliance focuses more on other criteria and considers a charity’s response to complaints by it or others. They turn these numbers into numerical ratings, that in my view, like many computer printouts, take on a sense of precision that isn’t fully warranted. They cover many of the larger charities, however, and particularly for those who are not familiar with the Form 990, these reviews can be helpful.Ĭharity Navigator has developed an incredibly detailed methodology for measuring and rating financial statistics provided on the Form 990. Those reports are a small portion of the 1 million public charities registered with the IRS or the 375,000 or more that file a detailed tax return each year. Charity Navigator and Wise Giving Alliance use these returns as a major basis for their reports.Ĭharity Navigator says it rates about 8000 charities, while the Wise Giving Alliance says it has reports on about 11,000. Each of the three organizations, sometimes called charity “watchdogs,” has its strengths but I personally tend to utilize GuideStar most frequently because I can find a complete IRS Form 990 tax information return for virtually every charity that files one and I understand how to read them.
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