Public Confidence in Charitable Organizations Continues to Lag, Report Finds

Public confidence in charities, which sank after the September 11 attacks, has been rising but remains below what it was before the terrorist strikes, a new report says.

More than a third, or 262, of 770 respondents to an October survey by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, said they lacked confidence in the ability of charities to spend donations wisely and to deliver services. Whether groups spend their money wisely is the top determinant of donors’ confidence in charitable organizations, the study found.

Nearly the same number of people expressed doubts about charities in an August Brookings report as did so in the October survey, suggesting an overall “stagnation in confidence” among a large group of prospective donors, said Paul C. Light, a professor of public policy at New York University and a senior fellow at Brookings, who wrote the report.

“These results should give everyone pause because they are related to the willingness of donors to give charitable dollars,” Mr. Light said. “The good news is that we may have reached bottom, but there is no reason to suggest that these numbers will go up anytime soon.”

Eighteen percent — or 138 of those surveyed for the October study — said they had a “great deal” of confidence in charities, up from 12 percent in August. But overall confidence in charities remained about the same in October as in August, Mr. Light said.

Altered View of Charity

Diminished confidence in charities comes at a time when public trust in virtually every other civic institution has gone up, the October study found. Confidence in charitable groups remains 10 percentage points lower than it was before the terrorist attacks — a reminder, Mr. Light said, that “things have changed and are continuing to change in the wake of September 11.”

Scandals that surfaced after the attacks have helped to alter what people think of charities, Mr. Light said. Soon after September 11, for example, the American Red Cross drew blistering criticism when it announced that it would spend more than $200-million of the money it raised in response to the terrorism attacks on future disasters rather than on the attack’s victims and their families.

Confidence in the American Red Cross has improved slightly in the past year, the latest Brookings study found. Some 82 percent of respondents now express a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the charity, compared with 78 percent in September 2002.

In the past year, however, hardly a week has passed without a story about questionable behavior in a nonprofit organization, Mr. Light said. Among the most prominent: A top executive at the Capital Area United Way, in East Lansing, Mich., was sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to repay more than $2-million she stole from the organization.

And newspaper articles scrutinized many foundations, including the James Irvine Foundation, in San Francisco, for paying what some critics view as excessive salaries to executives.

Those articles, Mr. Light said, have contributed to a continuing public perception that the nonprofit field fails to spend money prudently and lacks adequate oversight.

In fact, survey respondents said they believed that charitable organizations waste much more money than small private businesses do.

Changes Needed

Nonprofit organizations could improve their reputations with the public — and possibly raise more money than they do now — by spending money more shrewdly, Mr. Light said.

“Charitable givers now think of themselves as investors,” Mr. Light said. “Most people believe that charities have the right priorities, but they want to see that their donations are making an impact — and that their money isn’t being misused.”

The report, “To Give or Not to Give: The Continued Crisis in Charitable Confidence,” will be available free on the Brookings Institution Web site, http://www.brookings.org, after December 15.