Charity Navigator Announces First Key Ratings Updates Since 2020

Charity Navigator, a nonprofit ratings organization, announced major improvements to its signature ratings platform, all centered on providing fuller and fairer information about the nonprofits and charities donors are looking to support.

“Nonprofits pour everything into their missions and deserve a rating system that works just as hard to reflect it,” said Michael Thatcher, President and CEO of Charity Navigator. “Organizations and their donors told us they wanted a system that objectively reflects the full picture of a nonprofit’s work – not just the financials, but their people, their practices and their impact. Expanding how outcomes are reflected in our ratings is a priority for Charity Navigator, and today, we’re one step closer.”

One of the most significant additions to this update is Charity Navigator’s participation in the newly launched Impact Reporting Network. The Network, a partnership between measurement platform True Impact and CSR platform YourCause from Blackbaud, addresses nonprofits’ burden of duplicative impact reporting across platforms and funders. Nonprofits will be able to create a single outcomes report and choose to share it directly within Charity Navigator’s ratings, as well as across YourCause, Blackbaud’s corporate philanthropy and employee-giving platforms. This system will be as powerful as the information nonprofits choose to share. The sooner they submit their information, the sooner their scores will demonstrate their impact.

Charity Navigator has embedded True Impact’s guided impact reporting module into its Nonprofit Portal. Nonprofits can choose whether to create reports and whether to share them across the Network.

The updated rating system introduces several meaningful improvements for nonprofits and donors:

• The integration of new metrics and recalibrated scoring creates a more accurate rating system, better reflecting a charity's effectiveness while enhancing donor discernment
• Impact reporting can now be collected for all program types, including advocacy, arts and policy work and more
• Two new evaluation areas assess fair pay and workplace practices, recognizing that how an organization treats its own people is indicative of its effectiveness
• Success stories and narrative descriptions sit alongside raw numbers, because the human story behind a nonprofit's data matters
• A more intuitive and redesigned ratings page for better comprehension with new visual indicators – including a “Complete Profile” banner and beacon completion signals, like “3 of 4 beacons complete” – to show donors the information they are looking for to inform their giving decisions

A complete profile helps nonprofits be found, validated and funded by donors. The more an organization includes in its story – program descriptions, impact data, workplace policies, success stories – the more complete and accurate its rating will be.

Since its founding 25 years ago as a 501(c)(3) organization, Charity Navigator has continually refined how it evaluates nonprofits in service of its core mission to make impactful giving easier. The latest update – spanning new impact measurement tools, expanded evaluation areas and recalibrated scoring – reflects the same principle that has guided every update before it.

Source: Charity Navigator

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