#charitable giving
SpReAd the Love Book Challenge 2015
This post is part of the SpReAd the Love movement started in the Richard Armitage fandom by JazzBaby1andObscura.It has included all sorts of giving with this time being an annual event of book giving in honor of Dr. Seuss’s birthday. In that interest, I’ve decided to give some books to my “local” children’s hospital. I put local in quotes because the hospital is four hours from where I am, but…
So I’ve been critical of Billionaire Bruce Wayne a lot in the past, but I am increasingly coming around. I think I’ve talked before about Mackenzee Scott and the difficulties with trying to give away that amount of money fast enough to outpace the interest and dividends and other ways it balloons on itself, but just in case, the gist of it is that there’s a limit to what an individual can give to charity or gift to friends before taxes start mounting ever higher. At which point, yes you theoretically could give 18 billion or whatever to the federal government, if you were okay with most of that going to defense contractors and making the world a worse place. I am going to assume most of us are not.
Bruce Wayne has it worse though. Assuming roughly equivalent taxation schemes, his overtaxed charitable givings would likely still go to defense contractors. But it’s DC. You can’t convince me that, if you trace it back, most of them are owned by LexCorp. I cannot blame Brue for not wanting to fund Lex’s latest plan to villify him, kill his boyfriend, and blow up South Dakota or whatever. So giving money beyond the legal to charity is out - Lex and the corrupt feds will have to do without his billions.
Now in the real world there’s foreign tax dodges and money laundering schemes that one could maybe use to filter money to charities without the tax problem coming up. It’s exhausting, suspicious, and not without its own notable overhead, and the people in charge of it who would profit are also not nice, but it exists, sort of. In the DC universe though? There’s no way Penguin, the League of Assassins, Vandal Savage, or some other world-spanning sinister figure doesn’t skim off the top of criminal funding methods like that. Not only would trying taint the reputation of Billionaire himbo Brue Wayne, it would go right back to funding Batman’s enemies, just like the tax thing.
Which is why he keeps adopting new kids. And why Dick and all the rest have not stopped hearing him asking why he doesn’t have great-grandkids yet. Do they have kids yet? No? Gotta get on that so Bruce can have great-grandkids. Just hear me out.
There are a lot of “charitable” organizations out there ready to waste your money, including some major players like the Red Cross,the Human Rights Campaign, andthe Susan G. Komen Foundation (links go to articles about why you should not donate to these groups). So how do you decide which charities do deserve your money? I didn’t know, so I went a-googlin’ a while back, and here is a ten-step guide based on what I learned. (Of course you don’t have to follow it like a recipe, roll with whatever works for you!)
Step 1: Identify your personal priorities. Do you want to donate your money where it will make an immediate difference to the lives of individual people who are suffering right now, or are you more focused on research and infrastructure that will improve conditions on a structural level? Is supporting your local community important to you, or are you thinking more nationally or globally? Are there any causes that especially matter to you? Figure out what it is you’re looking for.
Step 2: Look up lists of charities addressing your areas of interest, and make your own list of candidate charities. Some resources:
- Philanthropedia lists charities by focus area—so, for example, you can easily view a list of organizations that address violence against women. They’re not picky about selecting their “experts,” though, so don’t rely on them for evaluation purposes.
- GiveWell provides a very short list each year of recommended charities, based on an extensive evidence-based review process that analyzes transparency and effectiveness. If your values align with theirs (objectively saving the largest number of lives per dollar), this seems like a great place to get recommendations.
- The Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy identifies effective social intervention programs.
- GreatNonprofits is a Yelp-like charity review site. I wouldn’t put much stock in the reviews themselves (they’re mostly from donors who don’t necessarily know much about the actual operations) but it’s a starting point for finding organizations if you’re looking on a US local or national level.
You can also just google charities by focus area, e.g. “animal charities list”, though if you do that you’ll want to be extra thorough with the vetting process in the next few steps.
Step 3: Google each candidate charity along with search terms like “criticism” and “mismanagement” to make sure they haven’t fucked up in public.
Step 4: Take an in-depth look at each charity’s website. See if they’re doing the kind of thing you want to support, and whether they have a history of accomplishing their goals. Things I screened for at this point include: a practical philosophy; specific information about their accomplishments and current objectives; a focus on addressing the root causes of the issues; and a recently-updated site so I can be sure all this is current. Your values may vary.
Step 5: Check them on GuideStar. Look at the Programs and Impact tabs to see if there’s information on how they measure and monitor their results. The Charting Impact reports ask a short list of questions designed to measure how well the organization is meeting its goals, but a lot of those haven’t been filled out—I hope more charities do them, because the ones I found were really useful.
Step 6: Check them on Charity Navigator. There’s a lot of financial info available there if that’s your jam, but some basic measures to check are fundraising efficiency (how much it costs them to raise each dollar—below 20 cents is good) and the CEO’s salary, under Compensation of Leaders (150-250k is about normal, anything much higher is a red flag). Don’t use administrative costs as an evaluation metric—charities with low administrative costs are often fudging the numbers and/or cutting costs in ways that negatively affect their results (more info).
Step 7: If you have any questions about a charity’s operations or impact, contact them. The good ones respond.
Step 8: Narrow it down. It’s better to donate more money to a few organizations than a little bit to many, because when you spread out your donations you lose a larger percentage to per-donation processing costs.
Step 9: Give without restrictions. Some charities give you the option of dedicating your donation to a particular program, but please don’t do that. It limits their ability to fund core operations, and reduces their freedom to adapt strategies as circumstances change. If you’ve done your homework, you should trust the organization to use your money well. I also recommend giving anonymously, unless you’re giving enough for the tax implications to be a big deal—I’ve given under my own name and they never leave you alone again, plus they share your info with other charities, and then you wind up with a mailbox full of spam.
Step 10: Stick to the plan. It’s way too easy to give in to guilty impulse-donating when charity fundraisers target you. Remember that you’re already doing the work to allocate your giving wisely. If a fundraising effort seems worthwhile and relevant to your interests, go research it and consider incorporating it into your donation strategy, but you probably don’t want to throw money at it on the spot without vetting it.
If you’d rather trust some stranger on the internet than do all this yourself, here are my choices:
- The American Civil Liberties Union
- Human Rights Watch (NOT the Human Rights Campaign!)
- The International Women’s Health Coalition
- Friends of UNFPA
- Farm Sanctuary
Hope this is useful!
