Charity evaluators

A charity evaluator is an organization, normally non-profit, that focuses on assessing charities. They attempt to bring concepts such as skepticism and business best practices to the field of philanthropy.

The Toronto Star reports on some of the difficulties and revelations of auditing charities as described by Charity Intelligence Canada (CIC). The authors call it "concerning", for example, that one in five of "Canada's top 100 charities" refused to release their full audited financial statements to CIC. Moreover, one quarter of the "top 100 charities" store at least 3 years worth of funding (that is, they have three times their annual budget in savings) and some store as much as 8 years worth. Of the "top 100 charities", 14% exceed the guidelines set by the Canada Revenue Agency by spending more than 35% of donations on fundraising – with some spending as much as 50% of donations on fundraising.

Charity evaluators have a range of different philosophies. For example, GiveWell challenged evaluators Charity Navigator and GreatNonprofits for their high ratings of the Central Asia Institute (CAI) after the CAI was involved in a scandal. GiveWell says its model was superior in this case because it recommends only a few charities most supported by evidence, and avoids commenting on charities that provide as little information as did CAI. GiveWell also contends that the most valuable charities are often those that work overseas, and do not work in disaster relief or microfinance. On the other hand, Charity Navigator CEO Ken Berger and a consultant to Charity Navigator, Robert M. Penna, harshly criticized the effective altruism movement, of which GiveWell is an organization, for being moralistic and elitist "by weighing causes and beneficiaries against one another". Philosopher and effective altruist William MacAskill defended the movement by comparing the choice to donate to an art gallery with the choice to save a painting rather than people from a burning building. GiveWell performs cost-utility analyses with the commensurable disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), allowing the comparison of the benefits of a marginal donation to charities working on very different causes and with very different outcomes. Another charity evaluator, ImpactMatters, founded by economist Dean Karlan and Elijah Goldberg and incubated at Innovations for Poverty Action, uses cost-effectiveness analyses which again calculate marginal costs, but with outcomes measured in the number of individuals reached in the currently released impact audits.

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