We created this list in 2007 of other online donor resources that we were aware of. We did not feel that any had the level of information necessary to help you make the most of your donation (in fact, this is the reason we started GiveWell). However, we provide them here both in order to make it clear how we differ and to provide our readers with as many options as possible.
Table of Contents
Basic information
The resources below provide extremely basic information on charities, generally taken from the IRS Form 990 (a required form for all US-registered charities). The 990 requires only a few descriptive sentences regarding a charity's mission and accomplishments; its focus is much more on financials (sources of income, accounting classifications of expenses, etc.)
We often use these resources ourselves, and encourage others to use them within context – recognizing that the information is not sufficient to start evaluating what charities do and whether it works, but can be useful as part of a much larger picture.
- GuideStar provides online access to the Form 990 for over 1 million charities.
In 2010, GuideStar started an initiative called TakeAction@GuideStar, which provides reviews and recommendations on charities working on a variety of causes. Reviews and recommendations are provided by partner organizations (including GiveWell) and individuals.
- JustGive. Provides the JustGive guide to 1000 charities, based on criteria including legal/financial status and awards from major foundations. Charity profiles give only information from the Form 990.
- DonorEdge. Profiles charities serving the five-county area of Greater Kansas City. Profiles include more detailed survey questions than those of the other resources in this section (though the answers are still highly general statements provided by the charities themselves), as well as financial information and a checkmark for profiles that have been reviewed and approved by DonorEdge (note that we are unable to locate a description of DonorEdge's criteria).
Watchdogs
We use “watchdogs” to refer to evaluators that “rate” charities they have no relationship with (in contrast to our project, which evaluates charities as part of a grant application process). Because they do not work with the charities they evaluate, watchdogs are limited to publicly available data – which generally consists of the IRS Form 990 (a required public filing for all US-registered charities) , as well as a few other documents such as the application for tax exemption and the organizational bylaws.
Having read many of these documents, we are confident in saying they rarely, if ever, give any picture of what a charity does and whether it works. The 990 requires only a few descriptive sentences regarding a charity's mission and accomplishments; its focus is much more on financials (sources of income, accounting classifications of expenses, etc.) Other publicly available documents describe only the structure of an organization, not its accomplishments, or even its activities at any level of specificity.
We are generally opposed to all existing watchdogs' ratings; while there may be some cases in which they can be used to identify “fraud” charities, we find them meaningless (occasionally) or backwards (more often) for the goal of finding the best charities. In particular, we believe that focusing on the percentage of funds spent on administration is a destructive practice that systematically leads to bad decisions and hurts nonprofits' abilities to help people. And while percentage of funds spent on overhead isn't the only metric used by the watchdogs we list below, we have yet to see them use a metric that we find genuinely representative of the quality of the organizations that they are evaluating.
To their credit, watchdogs are able to rank large numbers of charities by performing simple analysis on information that's easily available; we prefer to put in the hard work to get and interpret the information that matters.
Watchdogs we know of include:
- Charity Navigator. Rates over 5,000 charities using only information from the Form 990. To its credit, Charity Navigator publishes the full details of its methodology here. It uses a combination of metrics related to the percentage of funds spent on administration/fundraising and metrics related to revenue growth and financial assets; none of these metrics pertain to charities' ability or track record with helping people.
- American Institute of Philanthropy. Grades charities using criteria that are extremely similar to Charity Navigator's, and provides links to its top-rated charities.
- BBB Wise Giving Alliance. Indicates whether or not a charity meets its Standards for Accountability, which are based entirely on examination of financial statements and organizational bylaws.
- Independent Charities of America. An association of charities that meet certain standards; though these standards are not as explicitly specified as those of the other resources listed here, the general description implies that they pertain almost entirely to analysis of financial and legal status, and do not mention attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of activites.
- Past lists of most efficient charities published by magazines including Forbes and Money. Stated criteria are subsets of those used by Charity Navigator.
Donor social networks
Social networks have the broad goal of connecting donors to each other so that they can share ideas, information, recommendations, etc. We are in favor of making it easier to share information, but we believe that the larger problem is finding (as well as organizing) information.
We have found that truly understanding what a charity does requires a deliberate, concentrated, money-backed effort; it often involves asking questions that few others ask, and extracting information that charities are reluctant to share. Indeed, we've found that it takes more work than is possible while holding another full-time job (see our story).
We have tried to use the sites below to inform our donations, but as of now, we have not found any information on the activities and effectiveness of charities that is either thorough or well-organized. We have found impressions and anecdotes – the kind of information people can generate with little effort – but not in-depth analysis or careful comparisons, which take concentrated time to produce. We hope that as more substantive information about charities' effectiveness becomes available, these resources will become more useful.
- Change.org. Allows people to register, keep blogs, write nonprofit reviews, and more. Discussion tends to be informal and impression-based; we have not been able to find any of the information we seek on this website. See Exhibit 10 for a typical nonprofit review page.
- Glowfish. A generalized social network site similar in model, strengths and weaknesses to Change.org.
- Great Nonprofits. Currently in development; aims to allow both donors and people directly served by charities to publish (and read each others') informal, anecdotal reviews.
- SixDegrees.org. Allows people to create “charity badges” with brief descriptions of the charities they support, and to view their friends' badges as well as the badges of celebrities including Kevin Bacon.
UK resources
New Philanthropy Capital publishes general reports about charity, and also analyzes individual charities, giving more detail on those it supports than anyone else we've seen. We find its reports inadequate, because (a) they don't provide access to the longer papers and raw materials on which their statements are based; (b) because of this, their coverage of monitoring and evaluation is inadequate, providing conclusions without reasoning; (c) they discuss only recommended charities, not non-recommended charities; (d) they do not rank or directly compare recommended charities, leaving the donor to read through the reviews of all their many recommended charities (and even then, the reviews do not give enough information to decide between different good options). Even so, this is the only group we've seen to provide a third-party opinion of a charity's actual activities.