E-Giving

Q : What did Charity Navigator include in calculating my charity's working capital ratio?

Using the information from your charity's most recently filed Form 990, we include in this calculation your organization's net available assets. This includes unrestricted and temporarily restricted net assets, and excludes permanently restricted net assets.

For evaluations based on fiscal years ending prior to 12/31/08, working capital includes only the following assets and liabilities: cash, savings, accounts receivable, grants receivable, pledges receivable, investments in securities, accounts payable, accrued expenses, and grants payable.

Visit the Methodology section to read an in-depth explanation of how we calculate working capital ratio.

Q : How can I review prior ratings?

To review a charity's prior ratings, you will first need to become a registered user. Then simply click on the 'Historical Data' tab located towards the top of the charity's ratings page next to the 'Current Rating' tab.

Q : How can I update our contact information, mission statement, tag line?

Each charity’s official representative is able to suggest edits to the basic information, such as address and mission, shown on their rating page on our site. If you are the official representative, then log into the site and visit your charity’s rating page. There you will see an extra tab titled ‘edit profile.’ Use that to submit your changes. The analyst responsible for evaluating your charity will review your submission and either update your charity’s profile or contact you for additional information.

If your organization does not yet have an approved representative, then you simply need to visit your charity’s rating page and click on the link at the bottom to become your charity’s official representative. Once you have been approved, then you’ll have permission to make these simple edits.

Q : How do I know which years of Forms 990 are used to calculate my charity's rating?

We publish the fiscal year ending (shown as 'FYE' followed by a month and year) on each charity's rating page (next to the Income Statement and CEO Pay). You can determine the time period our rating covers by looking at the years listed along the horizontal axis of the revenue/expense trend graph. 

Q : The person listed as our CEO is no longer on staff. How do I input the new CEO's information?

At Charity Navigator we report the CEO for each organization according to what it provided in its most recently filed 990, even when that organization's CEO has changed in subsequent months. We only change the CEO information posted on our site when we obtain a new 990.

Why? We are trying to provide an objective resource that allows donors to compare charities, including CEO pay. Such comparisons are only possible when information is consistently reported and consistently identified as to from where it came. We report, for example, an organization's income statement according to its most recent 990, not according to current information. Similarly, we want the giver to know where the figure for the CEO's pay came from and for what period of time it covered. We believe there's an implicit connection between a CEO's compensation and the financial information provided in its income statement--that is to say, they are derived from the same financial circumstances. If we updated CEO information whenever an organization changed its CEO, the donor would no longer know for certain where the CEO pay figure came from or for what period of time it covered. Nor would the giver be shown the CEO pay that corresponds to the income statement we report on our site.

Q : Where did you get the mission information for my charity?

We created your mission statement from the information your charity published on its website. In rare cases, when the information on a charity's site is incomplete or the charity does not have a website, then we will consult the Form 990 and the charity's marketing materials. Our analysts perform minimal editing to correct spelling and grammatical errors, and to ensure that we're presenting each charity's mission in a similar format. We make every effort to publish a mission statement that captures the essence of your charity's work.

Q : Can I request to have my charity's CEO's compensation removed from your site?

No. We include CEO salary solely as part of our larger effort to bring transparency to the charitable sector and to help educate donors. It is a matter of public record. While we are not out to invade people's privacy, we do believe that by posting more information rather than less, we'll help the general public better appreciate the professionalism required to effectively run a charity. Our data demonstrates that the average CEO salary is roughly $167,000 --- a bargain when compared to executive pay in the private sector.

In recent years, CEO compensation practices at charities have come under increased scrutiny by government regulators. By publishing salaries on our site, we enable charities to benchmark their executives' compensation against that of their peers. This then allows charities to demonstrate their compliance with government regulations in setting a reasonable level of compensation for their top executive.

Q : What salaries are reported in the expanded Leadership section of the charity rating page?

For most charities, you will find that we continue to report only the compensation of the person holding the highest titled management position of the charity, as our experience indicates that in most instances, this compensation level is representative of the importance placed on salary by the organization. When a charity leader receives a salary from the charity and from an affiliate entity (or entities), we will publish the amounts in separate columns, rather than presenting a single aggregate amount as we have done in the past. We do not include affiliate compensation when we report the compensation as a percentage of total functional expenses.

At the same time, we want to help donors understand how other charities compensate the decision makers and key personnel involved with the organization. Therefore, when appropriate, we disclose compensation paid to Board Directors; persons earning as much or more than the chief executive; persons sharing the chief executive title; former chief executives still on payroll; relatives of Board members, founders and officers; and persons holding honorary titles within the organization.

If a charity does not list any compensation for the leader of the organization, we will attempt to report the compensation paid to the person responsible for running the day-to-day operations of the organization. In addition to this executive, we will list other highly compensated employees who may assume functions traditionally performed by a chief executive.

Q : Why has Charity Navigator changed the information on our charity's rating page regarding our Opt-out Donor Privacy Policy?

Many donors have contacted us about how we have traditionally grouped charities with less restrictive opt-out policies along with charities that enforce strict or opt-in policies, which offer the donor a greater level of privacy. In general, donors have told us they find opt-out policies confusing and are often disappointed that their personal information is not kept confidential.

In response, we have re-evaluated how we present donor privacy policy information on our site. When searching our site, donors will notice that we no longer group charities with opt-out policies together with charities that have stricter policies. If we determine that a charity has an opt-out policy, we are advising donors to contact the charity directly to find out how their personal information will be used.

Q : Where did you get the information used to evaluate my charity's financial health?

Charity Navigator obtains copies of each charity's Form 990 directly from the IRS shortly after it is filed. We do this to (1) expedite our process of evaluating charities, (2) refrain from imposing burdensome reporting requirements on the charities we rate, and (3) to ensure each charity is updated in the order in which it files new data. Once we have a new Form 990 for your organization from the IRS, we will promptly update your charity's record and publish a new evaluation on the first of the following month.

Q : What immediate impact will the redesigned IRS Form 990 have on my charity’s next Charity Navigator evaluation?

The IRS is affording certain 501(c)(3) organizations the option of a transition period with regard to use of the redesigned Form 990 for Fiscal Years 2008, 2009 and 2010. Specifically, small and mid-sized charities may use the IRS Form 990-EZ while they become familiar with the more comprehensive Form (for more information, please see the IRS Instructions).

Charity Navigator is unable to use Forms 990-EZ in our analysis, as this Form requires significantly less financial reporting than the Form 990. If an organization chooses to file the Form 990-EZ during the phase-in period, we will be unable to continue to publish an evaluation, and thus the rating page for the charity will be removed from our website.

Q : How did my organization get on your website?

It is possible that a donor or a member of your organization made a request that we evaluate your charity's fiscal health and we elected to do so after confirming that your charity meets our criteria for inclusion. However, it is more likely than not, that through our own selection process of reviewing data obtained from the IRS we identified your charity as meeting our criteria. For a detailed description of that process and a synopsis of our criteria for selecting charities, please consult "What Kind of Charities Do We Evaluate?"