December 8, 2005 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Americans have positive feelings about nonprofit groups in general, but they harbor serious reservations about some aspects of the philanthropic world, according to a new survey by Harris Interactive, a research company in Rochester, N.Y. The survey was intended to measure how Americans felt about charities in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Survey respondents gave charities an average rating of 65 on a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 meaning “very positive feelings.” But the respondents gave charities much lower marks when they were asked to assess the status of the nonprofit world. Thirty-four percent agreed with the statement that “the nonprofit sector in America is on the right track,” while 30 percent said they believed charities had “pretty seriously gotten off in the wrong direction.” The rest said they were unsure.
The survey was conducted online with 1,833 adults across the country over six days in October. The answers have a sampling error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points, and some may be skewed by what Harris Interactive calls in its report “the tendency for some people to claim they did the socially desirable thing when they did not actually do it.”
The poll examined reaction to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the tsunamis in Southeast Asia. Fifty-four percent of Americans said their opinions of nonprofit groups did not change in the aftermath of Katrina. As for the rest, 27 percent said they developed more-positive feelings, while 19 percent said they felt more negative about charities following the hurricane.
The poll found that young adults, Hispanics, and people with graduate and postgraduate degrees were more likely to give nonprofit groups favorable ratings than were other segments of the U.S. population, including low-income people and blacks. The Harris report says that the more-negative ratings among those groups “may be a reflection of the events in New Orleans,” referring to charities’ response to Hurricane Katrina. The survey found no difference in the ratings among people who identified themselves as Republican, Democrat, or having no political affiliation.
Also according to the survey, Habitat for Humanity and the Humane Society of the United States earned the highest scores among 12 nonprofit groups and governmental agencies graded for their relief work following Hurricane Katrina. The American Red Cross, about which 95 percent of the survey respondents said that they were aware of its post-disaster work, ranked seventh on the list.
A short report on the survey and all of its results are posted on Harris Interactive’s Web site at http://harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll.
