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Do charity-evaluation sites do a good job? Maybe not
By Gina Spadafori
December 24, 2008
The Wall Street Journal’s “Numbers Guy” Carl Bialik, who previously weighed in on “dog years” and how many cats a single unspayed cat could produce, looks at how good a job charity evaluation groups do in helping people choose where to give their donations:
Call it a false sense of humanity.
It may make you feel better to know that your charitable donations are going to organizations that have been highly rated by any number of online charity rankings. But these sites fail to quantify the most-important and most elusive charity measurement: success in achieving its mission.
Like stocks, charities typically are rated by their financial numbers or by qualitative characteristics such as corporate governance — or both. Unlike stocks, charities have no single measure akin to business profit to determine successful performance. There is a widespread search for such a number, but the challenges may be too daunting. Meanwhile, some of the measures that are used may inspire bad actors to try to game the system.
Since animal- and nature-related charities get millions of our dollars, you ought to give the Numbers Guy a read before making that year-end donation.
Update: And while you’re thinking about that donation, I also recommend reading this and this. And think about which organizations look for ways to save pets, and which look for excuses to kill them … and then do, despite known and proven alternatives.
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Also it was pointed out (I think by Terrierman) that sometimes a charity will divide itself into two distinct parts - like the HSUS so that the ‘charity’ end gets a high rating while the ‘lobbying’ end doesn’t. Where the money goes is anyone’s guess.
And when I queried CharityNavigator about this point, they never responded.
Comment by 2CatMom — December 24, 2008 @ 9:00 am
Also, I think it can be very difficult for someone not already involved to understand exactly what the raw statistics actually mean.
Our euthanasia figures are up this year - but this actually reflects increased activity of the veterinary welfare clinic side of what we do (because inevitably some clinic patients will have untreatable injuries or illness). Our rehoming figures are fairly static, and it would be easy for someone to look at the overall stats. and think they meant we were putting down more of our rehoming intake.
We probably ought to make more effort to separate figures for patients who have owners and animals in the rehoming program, but there would still be an element of artificiality considering that welfare clinic patients may be relinquished to us for rehoming if the owner can’t cope and animals in the rehoming program may be moved to the main clinic for treatment.
Comment by Rosemary — December 24, 2008 @ 1:06 pm