July 13, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
As president of the nonprofit watchdog group Charity Navigator, Ken Berger is accustomed to hostile audiences.
And he was indeed met with some skepticism and a flurry of questions from international nonprofit officials at the annual conference of InterAction last week, where he spoke about his efforts to change the way Charity Navigator rates nonprofit groups.
The watchdog organization has long been criticized for focusing too much attention on how much charities spend on administration. One nonprofit official who spoke at the InterAction conference, for example, said his group was so concerned about high administrative costs that it was reluctant to spend money keeping staff members safe overseas.
Mr. Berger said he understands such concerns and wants to find ways to resolve them. He said that Charity Navigator intends to modify the system it uses for rating charities’ financial health, and also include accountability and openness, as well as “outcomes,” in how it assesses nonprofit groups.
Mr. Berger, who joined the nonprofit watchdog last year, said he’s working with a group of charity leaders, grant makers, and philanthropy experts known as the Alliance for Effective Social Investing to determine ways to assess charities’ effectiveness and their impact on the communities they serve. (See The Chronicle article on the alliance).
He stressed that the process was still in its early stages, and he welcomed feedback from charity officials in how to shape a revised ratings system.
Many questions remain. For example, he says he’s just beginning to wrap his head around how to evaluate advocacy organizations.
Maliha Khan, director of program impact at CARE, said she was concerned that her charity would be less open to self-analysis and self-evaluation if it knew its mistakes would be aired on a site such as Charity Navigator.
Mr. Berger told Ms. Khan not to worry: Any system Charity Navigator developed, he said, would be so “macro” that it wouldn’t get into the sorts of evaluations that Ms. Khan is undertaking at her charity. He said the fact that CARE has hired Ms. Khan to oversee efforts to assess the effectiveness of its programs, for example, means that it’s already far ahead of most charities and would perform well on the evaluation system Charity Navigator developed.
Mr. Berger said Charity Navigator would rely on charities to establish their own measurements and standards, rather than imposing standards on them.
But many in the audience wondered if trying to produce easily digestible, four-star-style ratings based on effectiveness was an impossible task. Some thought charities’ missions were too diverse to compare.
“I feel sorry for you,” said one woman in the audience. “You are comparing apples and oranges.”
“And also vegetables and steak, too,” said Mr. Berger.
He said donors want to know whether they are giving to strong charities and that if Charity Navigator doesn’t provide this sort of information, “somebody else will.”
What do you think of Charity Navigator’s efforts?
