maybetwice:

ruffboijuliaburnsides:

violent-darts:

ameliarating:

Every time you say that you only donate to charities and non-profits with extremely low overhead and administrative costs, what you’re actually saying is that you’ll only support charities and non-profits that underpay their employees and stretch them thin because they don’t have the budget to hire enough of them.

Transparency should be the priority here. Not low administrative costs.

#OH MY FUCKING GOD THIS#AS SOMEONE WHO’S WORKED IN A NONPROFIT THAT HAD LIKE THREE PEOPLE AT HEAD OFFICE#AND AT NONPROFITS WITH A STRONG AND LARGE TEAM OF SUPPORT STAFF#IT MATTERS#IT FUCKING MATTERS

THIS. 

Also? Especially in really BIG catastrophes, in the IMMEDIATE aftermath? 

You want the charities that can MOBILIZE FAST. You CANNOT DO THAT if you are pinching every penny and working to the minimal staffing. You just can’t. 

Transparency is important. And a charity should be able to EXPLAIN why each of the dollars they spent is spent the way it is, and it should be a solid reason. 

And no, this is not just a factor of Money Is Evil. Even if we weren’t in a monetary-reward situation, value of effort, time and training still exists, as does value of goods, and it would simply turn to a different metric. 

Considering all the damage done by Harvey and BEING done by Irma and Jose, this seems like a good time to reblog this.

Let me please emphasize that it is so fucking important to do your homework on charities and their transparency. It’s true that non-profits are notorious about paying staff much less than what they’d make in other sectors and asking them to do much more (and more diverse) work. When I moved into a non-profit job, I literally took an 11% pay cut. And people generally don’t mind making a little less in non-profit jobs, because the work is usually worthwhile and fulfilling. So, yes, you want your donations to also go to paying the people who do the skilled labor that makes those organizations work. 

But here are a lot of words about transparency in non-profits and why it matters:

What you actually need to care about is the size of an organization’s budget and how their proportional spending shakes out. If you have, say, a $400 million annual budget, and an overhead of over 30%, then this charity has a really serious problem. And I’m not pulling these numbers out of my ass here – these are roughly the numbers for a specific charity I’m going to use as my example here. 

You see, the charity I have in mind spends a lot of money on overhead costs. They have a pretty big staff, multiple offices across the U.S. and around the world, and a huge number of programs they support. Most of their $400 mil revenue comes from donations from regular folks who want their money to help people. People really believe in this charity. 

This charity also doesn’t measure program outcomes using carefully constructed metrics that speak to the goals of their programs, but rather irresponsible “corporate” metrics like raw money spent, which fail to capture the efficacy of a program and its impact. (When I worked for the federal government, we called this the “burn rate”, which measured only how fast a program could spend money on something, not what it was spending on or if it addressed the program goals at all.) Which doesn’t sound super sexy, but it’s essential.

This charity also lobbies the government not for its issue of choice, but to remove federal caps on how much non-profits can retain for “overhead.” Rules which prevent non-profits from being run like corporations and pay their executives enormous amounts of money. Rules that prevent organizations from doing what this charity did before it made the news early last year for throwing bogglingly lavish company parties and paying their executives egregiously large sums.

You almost certainly have heard of this charity if you live in the US, because I’m describing Wounded Warrior Project. 

Now, I’m using them as an example because their issues were big enough that they made the New York Times last year, and they did fire several of the executives who were steering them in a bad direction (as well as some folks down the chain). I have no idea if they’ve actually done much to fix the systemic issues in both their finances and how they administer and measure programs, or if they’ve abandoned their lobby to end non-profit financial restrictions, or if they are just sort of laying low until people generally forget so they can recover their cred as a worthy charity. But it’s a really great example of what you should do when evaluating whether you want to give your money to an organization. A 10% overhead is not a bad thing, not even for huge organizations that scale up their efforts. Looking for non-profits with 2% overhead is also not great, because it usually means their ability to do work is pretty limited. Local organizations can be a good bet, because they’re closer to the issues of a community (while multinational NGOs/NPOs practice an unsettling form of paternalistic Western charity and would be better off giving money to local orgs), but they don’t always have the same capability and efficiency of larger, better-staffed organizations. 

So, there are a lot of issues with non-profits, there’s a lot of money flying around in the industry, and there isn’t a perfect way to identify which organizations best align with your goals and intentions by donating. But you absolutely can and should do some research using resources available to you – usually by taking a look at the program and finance reports on charity webpages to see how money is being spent and how programs are talking about their outcomes. This is also a great document (although a little older) that talks about the importance of digging deeper than easily digested ratios and figures that don’t capture what’s really happening under the hood.