Charity begins with financial health?

Check out the Charity Navigator.

Their Mission:

Charity Navigator works to guide intelligent giving. We help charitable givers make intelligent giving decisions by providing information on over five thousand charities and by evaluating the financial health of each of these charities. We ensure our evaluations are widely used by making them easy to understand and available to the public free of charge. By guiding intelligent giving, we aim to advance a more efficient and responsive philanthropic marketplace, in which givers and the charities they support work in tandem to overcome our nation's most persistent challenges.

Charity Navigator is a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization under the Internal Revenue Code and does not accept any contributions from any charities we evaluate.

It's an interesting concept for sure. I think, however, there are some issues with judging charities solely by the measure the Charity navigator does. For instance I went to their Animal Rights and Welfare section and sorted by highest rating first. Here are the results. What do you notice? I notice that the majority of organizations scoring highest are extremely targeted. many of them are very targeted geographically, a few targeted by breed. In any case, I think it's interesting that the organizations that focus very specifically are able to be more financially attractive, and I suppose it's not counter-intuitive in any way. But I don't know if it's all that helpful for those of us not in those targeted areas.

The primary reason I couldn't use this tool alone for some of my charitable giving is that it does not extend beyond financial health as a criteria. When it comes to health and medicine-related charities, however, I certainly do. I don't give to charities that support animal testing. I guess I'll have to continue to rely on the PCRM's list of charities that don't for that kind of information. but maybe now I'll cross-check them on the Charity Navigator.