A friend of mine and I were delighted to discover Charity Navigator, which provides some quick stats on about 2,500 charitable organizations. Each charity is rated by "efficiency" (how much of the cash gets spent on fundraising and overhead) and "capacity", which I believe to be some estimate of how many people (or whatever) are being served. I don't know how the two are combined.

The issue arose because this friend had given a bit of money to the Denver Mission, and indicated to them (she felt) that it was a one-time thing. She was later disgusted to discover they deluged her in high-gloss pleas for more giving. Google hooked us up with the aforementioned navigator, where we learned they spent about 19% of their income on more fund-raising! (And about 25%, overall, on overhead.) Of course, my friend didn't really intend to use $0.19 of each dollar she donated to subsidize junk mail back to herself!

Charity Navigator uses a "star" rating to rate charities. Four stars, good, fewer, not as good. The Denver Mission was a three-star affair, but apparently, about as low as you could get before falling to two stars.

And I accidentally discovered something interesting about my local PBS station: KETC was a solid one-star charity! Ask me if I'm shocked. ("No.")
More in the next post...