Charities and accountability

As I was perusing through the web, I found a couple of interesting and useful sites. Useful in lending transparency to the oft-times vague world of non-profits and charities. So if you're interested in knowing how much of your money goes to where and what charities to contribute to, then these are good sites to begin your search at.

Charity Navigator is a non-profit free of charge public service which seeks to 'guide intelligent giving'. You can type in your favorite non-profit and presto! get revenues, net revenues, fundraising expenses, and executive pay. I did a search for Keep America Beautiful, just to be consistent with my prior blog lines, and found out that the executive pay for a certain G. Ray Empson was $293,850, or 8.07% of total expenses. Apparently working for non-profits can be quite lucrative. Who says you can't help the homeless and clean the streets AND help yourself? Now, not all the charities are quite as, uh, lucrative, and a large proportion do have salaries in line with what sort of revenues are taken in. But why Charity Navigator, which is a non-profit, is not listed in their own website is not clear.

Another good website is Guidestar, which is similar to Charity Navigator, and has at least 1.5 million organizations listed. They're more comprehensive in terms of supplying tax information (Form 990) and give even further breakdown of employee data. There are different levels though of what can be seen, pay to play sort of thing. All in all, still a good thing.