To Give or Not To Give.

Since I moved back to DC, I’ve worked for EarthShare, an environmental fundraising federation. We assist nonprofits in raising funds through workplace giving and the Combined Federal Campaign (the federal government’s version of workplace giving). I had no prior knowledge of workplace giving, the Combined Federal Campaign, or really even charitable giving until I interviewed for the position.

For six months now, I’ve been promoting our member charities through Twitter, Facebook, and our e-newsletters asking people to give to their favorite charities without ever really knowing what the system was for donating or what the process for choosing your charities could be like.

Tuesday, we finally had our in-house workplace giving campaign where you learn about the charities you can support, ask questions about donating, and play some silly games. Larger companies and branches of the government have full-blown charity fairs where every type of charity can come out and speak to employees about their program work and why it’s important.

Before the campaign, I already knew the three charities I wanted to give to – two EarthShare charities the Surfrider Foundation and American Farmland Trust, and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. I make exactly $9 over an even amount every pay period so I figured I’d donate $3 every paycheck to each one of them for a total gift of $72 a year to each charity ($216 a year if you aren’t a math wizard). It may seem like a lot of money, but, honestly, I won’t miss $9 a pay check. It’s one less trip to Chipotle or two less trips to Starbucks a month. I think I can give that up for the greater good.

When I went to fill out my donation form, I instantly noticed that IAVA wasn’t listed as a beneficiary in my campaign. You can get around that if you donate more than $100 a year to a charity, but my donation was just going to be $72.

I searched for more EarthShare charities in the brochure and came across two other charities I absolutely love: The Student Conservation Association and Rails-To-Trails Conservancy. Both have impressive accomplishments throughout 2009 and work hard to conserve land across the country.

• SCA boasts 50,000 alumni and this year they had 4,000 volunteers who logged over 2 million hours! SCA encourages young people to volunteer in their communities, tracks individuals’ progress, and has some pretty impressive alumni (G. Love of G. Love & The Special Sauce!).
• RTT turns abandoned railroads into biking and hiking trails in communities across America. They’ve helped in the preservation of nearly 1,500 trails across the country. Their programs have encouraged other organizations, such as popular the Highline Park in New York City, to do similar work. RTT also promotes bike riding and healthy lifestyles which I fully support without actually knowing how to ride a bike.

How do I choose between those two?

Since I’m intimately familiar with both programs, I decided to look at just the facts – their ratings on Charity Navigator.

RTT received just one-star which was very confusing to someone who knows their work. It’s so hard to judge every charity on the same standards – low overhead and fundraising efficiency – and put it in the same magical equation just to spit it back out with a one-, two-, three-, or four-star rating. RTT technically has a large overhead, but what if their programs don’t actually cost that much to implement? Maybe they need a larger staff to accommodate the various programs in each state so that makes their administrative expenses skyrocket. Also, because their program growth was down for the year, they lost a lot of points in the efficiency rating. Should a charity really be penalized one or two stars because their programs didn’t grow during the recession? The fact that they only decreased by 2.3% is pretty impressive to me.

On the other hand, SCA received a three-star rating. Their fundraising expenses and overhead were each half of RTT. Additionally, they had a 9% growth in 2008. These are all impressive things, but my feelings about the RTT rating left a sour taste in my mouth and decided to toss this so-called statistical reasoning out the window.

I brought the ratings up with a coworker who had no idea that RTT had a one-star rating. We’re both familiar with, and fans of, their work and were shocked to hear they ranked so low. I couldn’t imagine being an uninformed donor having just the Charity Navigator rating to go off of when choosing a donor.

EarthShare recently did a survey of workplace givers and the psychology behind why they give for which charities. Many of them use sources like Charity Navigator and GuideStar (both are GuideStar valued partners, as is EarthShare) to vet the charities they’ll contribute to. If this is all they have to go on, how often are deserving charities missing out on donations? Are there other charities that do funny math on their overhead fees and get higher ratings? Could they benefit?

Who knows.

I have until January to determine which charity I’m going to choose and will continue to do research until then. Maybe I’ll just wind up giving $3 a pay period to each one of them!