How much of your charity goes to charity

By on July 6, 2008 in Philanthropy · Comments are closed

The LA Times has a feature that tracks all the major charities and reports how much of each dollar goes to the actual charity. In some case organizations lose more than 90 percent of funds raised to professional cash finders.

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4 Responses to How much of your charity goes to charity

  1. Susan Stabile July 7, 2008 at 10:22 am #

    There are several sites providing evaluations of the use of funds by charitable organizations. One I always check is Charity Navigator, at: http://www.charitynavigator.org/.
    I’m not quite sure why, but I couldn’t find some major charities through the L.A. Times feature.

  2. jbf July 7, 2008 at 10:28 am #

    It may be that this sentence explains the difficulty… “It includes all for-profit fundraising campaigns exclusive to California, as well as any national campaigns that took place in the state.”

    Thanks for the link to a more comprehensive site.

  3. Toma' July 7, 2008 at 2:11 pm #

    Yes, this site looks more professional. It allows to use different methodologies to compare scores of various charities.

    LA Times used two important for them categories. But are mileage and car size the only criteria to buy efficient low-cost vehicle?

    Nothing comes for nothing. Everybody knows, that planting an apple tree and not taking care of it will not lead to crops but will cause tree’s fade.

    Of course net-return is important to estimate either charity is efficient or not, either it is worth our contribution or not. Important are also ways of collecting donations, places where organization works, number of staffed and volunteer team, administration costs, marketing costs and so on. a small, local charity will raise high costs of revenue. Single billboard or newspaper advertisement costs the same small organization and a large, nationwide one. But price varies either one advertisement is bought or hundreds of them. So is about administration costs, paylist.

    Most of the regular incomes in all charities come not from one-time campaign but from regular donors, everyday collections and systematic activities

    Some charities goals are popular and some are not. Public awareness will always focus on well-known institutions instead of small local ones with unclear goals sometimes.

  4. Toma' July 7, 2008 at 2:13 pm #

    The other text explains insufficiency of the database: “The data cover both California-specific efforts and national campaigns that included solicitations within California. They do not cover fundraising by charities’ in-house solicitors. These data may contain filing errors by fundraisers, or recording errors by the state.”