Historically, donors who care about effectiveness haven’t had many options. Measuring a charity’s impact is time intensive and requires answering lots of difficult questions - which of these studies on the effects of education programs on test scores later in life do we believe? If the charity has limited data, how far can we generalize from the data it does have? If it collects no data on many of its programs, what should be our base assumption about their impact? “At the end of the day, we want to know what our money has done, not necessarily where it got spent.”īut that’s easier said than done.
“Impact has always been seen as the holy grail,” Michael Thatcher, the CEO of Charity Navigator, told me. Stories about ineffective charities are remembered by donors, who often give less - and effective charities that do a lot of good tend to make for less memorable stories. In surveys, most of them list effectiveness as one of their top concerns when giving to charity, and many people don’t give to charity out of a vague sense that most charities don’t work very well. Even within a specific category, ImpactMatters cofounder Elijah Goldberg told me, some soup kitchens feed far more people with the same amount of money some homeless shelters are able to offer quality shelter to far more people.ĭonors care about that. Figuring out how much good charities doĬharity Navigator’s new rating system is the latest move in a growing trend: greater awareness that nonprofits vary immensely in how much good they accomplish. The Charity Navigator acquisition demonstrates that impact is becoming more and more of a priority in the nonprofit sector - and that seems likely to be very good for the world. But until pretty recently, there often wasn’t any answer to that question that an average donor could find. When it comes to giving, what really matters is how much good your money will do.
It’s acquired a smaller, impact-focused charity evaluator called ImpactMatters, which estimates how far your money goes when you donate it, and is rolling out a new Impact and Results rating that lets people choose charities by how much they get done. This week, Charity Navigator announced that will change. The world’s largest independent charity evaluator is called Charity Navigator, and it lists hundreds of thousands of US-based charities with programs around the world, providing information to help donors decide whether they want to give money there.Ĭharity Navigator provides insights into a nonprofit’s financial stability and adherence to best practices for accountability and transparency.īut until recently, it’s been unable to answer one big question donors frequently want to know: How much good will my money actually do?
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