How Charity Rater Works

Toolkit for donors

The Charity Rater is different than all the other rating systems. The Charity Rater educates and empowers individual donors by helping them evaluate aid organizations themselves. The final score is based upon what the donors themselves discover on the organization's website. More than just a rating system; the Charity Rater is a toolkit for good donorship.

Format

The rating system's format is similar to a survey with approximately 17 multiple choice questions. The donor uses information on the charity's website to answer each question. The total number of questions will vary, based on the answer to previous questions some questions will be activated and others will remain inactive and hidden.

Questions are divided into eight sections. Each section contains background on the topic and information on why the question is important.  Links to additional resources are provided for donors that want to learn more. The process takes approximately 10 - 20 minutes to complete, your investment of time will help you become a better, more empowered donor.

You may choose to stop at any time, but it’s recommended that you answer all questions before making a decision to donate. Upon submitting your answers you will receive a score for that aid agency and a list any “red flags”. The score is the percentage of the total points possible for that organization.

What you need to use the system

The rating system works best when the donor has access to the charity's website. If there is no website a second option is the annual report or talking to the organization directly. Rating a charity based on solely on their promotional material will not be successful as these materials do not provide adequate information.

Charity transparency

The accuracy of this rating system, and many others, requires the transparency of aid organizations. You may find that the organization you are trying to rate does not share meaningful information with donors.

If you cannot easily find the information you need to answer the questions, then the aid organization has not provided donors with the information they need to make informed funding decisions. Let the charity know what information you need and that you expect them to make this same information readily available to all donors in the future.

Transparency is a serious problem in the aid world. The lack of transparency makes it impossible for donors, charity watchdogs, or the larger aid world to hold organizations accountable for providing quality, appropriate aid. Aid organizations will only become more transparent when individual donors, like you, require and reward it.

What shouldn’t be evaluated with this system

This system is not designed to be used with foundations or with umbrella organizations because they do not lead aid projects but instead oversee other organizations. An example of an umbrella organization would be Care International. If you are interested in rating Care look instead at a member organization, such as Care USA, Care Netherlands, or Care Kenya.

Future improvements

This system was launched earlier than anticipated to help donors make donation decisions after the earthquake in Haiti. If you have suggestions on how we can improve the system, please take a minute to share your ideas. Planned future improvements include the following:

• A sign in and registration system will be created to allow users to save their work and come back later. Users will also be able to retrieve scores from organizations they previously rated and compare organizations against each other.
• A progress bar at the top of each page will show users where they are in the rating process.
  
• Compiled scores will eventually be available. Once enough different users have rated the same organization and received similar scores, the average scores will be spot checked for accuracy and then made available to a wider audience. Depending on whether there are enough contributions to cover our operational costs of The Charity Rater, these scores will be made available to registered users free of charge or for a small fee.
  
• A translation feature will be added to allow the system to be used in several different languages