What you need to know about Charity Navigator’s new rating system
Charity rating website, Charity Navigator, announced that it will introduce a change to its rating system by 2016. The new methodology called Results Reporting will attempt to rate how effective a nonprofit really is.
Originally Charity Navigator only rated a nonprofit’s financial health. That rating was based solely on evaluations made from tax returns and IRS 990 Forms. The 10,000 nonprofits on the site were rated on program expenses, administrative expenses, plus fundraising expenses and efficiency.
In 2011, CN 2.0 was launched to expand the analysis to include accountability and transparency. Both of these factors tell a donor how easy it is the obtain important information about a nonprofit’s activity, assets and financial history.
According to a website post, Charity Navigator will, for the next several years:
“…give donors immediate access to our research during this process, we will post our findings on each charity’s page month by month, as the new data is gathered.
- However, this new analysis will not impact any charity’s star rating until we have gathered the data for all 10,000.
- This is a data gathering phase for the the new rating system. The information will be displayed as it is updated but the ratings wont change until each charity’s data is organized and displayed.”
The new rating system elements are:
- Alignment of Mission
- Solicitations and Resources
- Results Logic and Measures
- Validators, and Constituent Voice
- Published Evaluation Reports.