Charity Ranking

It's getting towards that time of year when I ramp up my charitable giving, and this year I decided it was time to do more investigation into whether the charities were worth giving money to.  Naturally, there is a site that investigates them and provides grades and some rankings.

Based on other things I have read, I was not terribly surprised that the Canadian Red Cross scored poorly, with a low percentage of funds actually spent in the field, though I was surprised that their impact grade was low as well, perhaps because more of the funding ends up cycled through for admin (and more fund raising!).  In contrast, Médecins Sans Frontières had a terrific score, one of the best across all categories and in the very top for international aid.  For me in practical terms, I think I will just cut out the Red Cross and redirect any donations to MSF.

I often give donations to the Heart and Stoke Foundation.  Their ranking was kind of middle of the road, with some softness around their impact and a slightly lower percentage of donations (65%) spent on programming rather than on overhead than I would like to see.  In practical terms, I will probably continue to donate but only in periods (like now) where there is a 2x or 3x match.

I was most surprised at their quite low ranking for the Toronto Star Charities (the Fresh Air Fund and the Santa Claus Fund).  While the percentage to programming and gifts is extremely high (94%!), they give it a D+ for not actually reporting much on the number of gifts given out and children sent to camp.  I'm not really sure why the reporting is lax, but I feel pretty comfortable in continuing to send money to them, usually twice a year (and indeed it's about that time again...).

Not too surprisingly my very local charity (Eastview) is not in the database, but I think I'll give money to them anyway.

I ran through some of the arts organizations I donate money to.  Not surprisingly, they were a mixed bag.  TSO and Soulpepper had reasonable percentages spent on programming (better than Canadian Stage certainly), though impact was a bit unclear.  Coal Mine and Esprit Orchestra weren't even listed. 

So in the end I probably won't change much of what I have done in the past, aside from stop giving to the Red Cross and give more to MSF instead.