Charity Metrics
METHODOLOGY.
To encourage more intelligent giving, Charity Metrics seeks to publicize cost per achievement data on single mission non-profits organizations. Many excellent non-profit organizations such as the American Cancer Society or the Natural Resource Defense Council cannot be evaluated by a single metric and are thus, excluded from the database. Similarly, many organizations are engaged in multiple activities, making it impossible to evaluate operational effectiveness based solely on available financial information. Determining if Partners in Health, Oxfam, or Care is more effective, for example, is too challenging a task without in-depth analysis of individual programs and projects. We would encourage you to use the links section of our website to see how other evaluators rate more complex organizations.
To determine our rankings, we develop a single operational metric to evaluate charities of a particualr type and then rank them from highest to lowest along this metric. All data is self-reported by the non-profits in their annual reports and is not audited for accuracy by Charity Metrics. We have initially focused on organizations with annual revenues greater than $13.5 million, but hope to build a more complete database over time. We have attempted to identify as many organization types as possible that fit into the cost per achievement framework and would welcome suggestions for other areas to evaluate.
We acknowldge that our methodology is limited in scope, in terms of the number of organizations we can evaluate, and can be overly simplfying. In evaluating ballet organizations, for example, we have no way of incorporating the quality of the production when ranking by cost per attendee. That said, we believe the statistics we provide are still valuable and informative in measuring operational performance on a relative and absolute basis particularly when used in conjunction with other charity evaluation websites.
To determine our rankings, we develop a single operational metric to evaluate charities of a particualr type and then rank them from highest to lowest along this metric. All data is self-reported by the non-profits in their annual reports and is not audited for accuracy by Charity Metrics. We have initially focused on organizations with annual revenues greater than $13.5 million, but hope to build a more complete database over time. We have attempted to identify as many organization types as possible that fit into the cost per achievement framework and would welcome suggestions for other areas to evaluate.
We acknowldge that our methodology is limited in scope, in terms of the number of organizations we can evaluate, and can be overly simplfying. In evaluating ballet organizations, for example, we have no way of incorporating the quality of the production when ranking by cost per attendee. That said, we believe the statistics we provide are still valuable and informative in measuring operational performance on a relative and absolute basis particularly when used in conjunction with other charity evaluation websites.
