Another part of Charity Navigator’s financial rating system is to have reserves for a rainy day.  In order to get a top rating from Charity Navigator, an organization must have 12 months of operating expenses in the bank (depending on the sector: lower for food banks and relief organizations; higher for foundations, libraries, parks, foundations, etc.)

I fully agree that nonprofits should build reserves.  There are natural ebbs and flows of both revenues and expenses in the nonprofit world; usually one is ebbing while the other is flowing.  Additionally, funders sometimes have demands that are off-mission, counterproductive, or political.  You need a bank of money so that you can say no to quick bucks at the long-term expense of your mission.  And you want to be able to take advantage of unforeseen opportunities as well as preparing for unforeseen difficulties.

Because it has a basis in need, this may be CN’s most helpful financial metric, which is much like the Taller Than Mickey Rooney Award: you can still be very short and win.

Remember, Charity Navigator purports to be a guide to where you should give your money as a donor.  And there are two problems with it as guidance to donors.

First, it rewards the hoarding of money.  There literally is no upper limit on how much you can have in reserves and still max out your reserves rating.  In fact, they brag about this on their site:

“Givers should know that other independent evaluators of charities tend not to measure a charity’s capacity. Indeed, charities that maintain large reserves of assets or working capital are occasionally penalized by other evaluators. In our view, a charity’s financial capacity is just as important as its financial efficiency. By showing growth and stability, charities demonstrate greater fiscal responsibility, not less, for those are the charities that will be more capable of  pursuing short- and long-term results for every dollar they receive from givers.” (here)

The simple question is would you rather fund an organization that ten months of expenses in the bank or ten years?

My inclination, as I would think most carbon-based lifeforms’ inclinations would be, is the ten-month organization.  If you have ten years of reserves in the bank, you are almost certainly not funding worthy projects and not investing in your infrastructure or growth.

BBB asks that you cap your reserves at three years to make sure you aren’t doing this — it seems like a better practice that CN is actively avoiding.  Or, put well from ACEVO, Charity Finance Group and the Institute of Fundraising:

“Charities need to justify their reserves. Holding a high level of cover for risks and unforeseen events appears sensible, but is this right if worthwhile projects are going unfunded? Charity funds are meant to be spent; therefore charities should be able to provide solid, considered justification for keeping funds back as reserves and not spending them.”

Nonprofits do not exist for the purpose of existing.  They exist to solve a societal problem.  If you have too much in reserves, you are privileging your existence over your mission.  And to that I say

Second, it advises against giving to those who may need it most.  Let’s say there are three nonprofits, both with substantial (let’s say 15 months worth of) reserves.  Disaster strikes: a grant that makes up more than half of each of their budgets dries up.  Thankfully, they have prepared for this rainy day and, after consulting with their boards, they each take action:

• Nonprofit 1 has a policy that they will not go below 12 months of reserves, per Charity Navigator’s advice.  They spend some from their reserves, but have to make small cuts in program and large ones in infrastructure to keep their bank balance solid.
• Nonprofit 2 also believes strongly in a solid reserve, but not at the expense of their programmatic activities.  They dip into their reserves, taking them below the 12-month mark (knowing they will be penalized even more if they cut program activity), and prop up their program activities to a stable level.  However, they make no move to upgrade their fundraising abilities to replace their revenues.
• Nonprofit 3’s board says that moments like this are the reason you have reserves.  They do what it takes to replace their program expenses and invest in ways to increase their unrestricted giving to replace the missing funds.

Charity Navigator ranks these organizations 1, then 2, then 3.  As a donor, three is the only one I’d want to give to — the only one that cares enough about their programs to sustain them for the short term and work to salvage them for the long term.

At the point where you are advising people to give to nonprofits in the exact wrong order than the one you should be, you probably need to rethink your financial metrics and do more than rearrange the deck chairs.

But that’s not the worst part.  Not only does Charity Navigator advise against giving to those who need it most; it advises against giving to those who have the most impact (or at the very least, is impact agnostic).  We’ll talk about that more tomorrow.

Last week, Charity Navigator released its new 2.1 rating system after reassessing its financial ratings.  This was an approximation of my reaction:

I’d heard about Charity Navigator 3.0 and thought that maybe they would finally start focusing on nonprofit results.  But then they tried to use their lack of expertise to judge the logic models of experts in the field.  I argued then as now that I would trust the American Heart Association on how to prevent heart disease more than Charity Navigator, just as I would trust the doctor or nurse in the ER more than an intern at the hospital’s accounting firm.

I was hopeful with this effort was euthanized.  And I’d hoped that new leadership and time would change things.  But then their new leadership said that (in essence) mail may not make sense for nonprofits (story here).  As if we need less money to go to noble causes, not more.

Then they surveyed nonprofit leaders about the effectiveness of their metrics.  I gladly participated, telling them what were their most and least helpful metrics (answer: they were all tied for least helpful, in that they are not just not helpful but counterproductive).  Again I hoped for change.

What we saw on the first were a couple of tweaks: the manicure to a patient with a sucking chest wound.

This is frustrating, but I believe in the idea of giving insight into nonprofits for those who want it.  Like companies, people, or governments, there are good nonprofits and great nonprofits and scam nonprofits and blah nonprofits.

And I like that nonprofits are stepping up to do this.  When governments have to get involved, we too often see a cleaver used instead of a scalpel.

Charity Navigator’s own accountability and transparency metrics are very strong and helpful (other than the misguided view of what a privacy policy is).  When you don’t have things like an independent board, systems to review CEO compensation, regular audits, and so on, there’s a good chance you might be a scam (or very young as an organization).

But Charity Navigator continues to prop up the overhead myth, as described here.  While this is the most grievous sin, it is by no means the only one.  Thus, this week, we’ll take a look at why you should not only ignore the Charity Navigator financial metrics, but actively do the opposite.

With the new Charity Navigator ratings, program expenses are on a rating scale instead of using the raw value.  This focuses even more on the fallacious overhead rate, giving greater emphasis to differences among nonprofits.  In my post on the overhead myth, I talked about how a focus on overhead generally will prevent a non-profit from making the investments needed to grow.  Now, let’s look at a specific case of how focusing on fundraising expenses hurts growth, that of diminishing marginal returns.

Perhaps like me your econ class was at 8 AM, so let me explain with a thought experiment. Let’s say you were going to do a mailing to only one person.  You’d clearly pick out the best possible donor to send to — the person who gives you a significant donation every single time.

Now, let’s say you found an extra couple of quarters in your couch and wanted to mail a second person.  You’d find another person who is almost as good as the first — maybe they give a significant donation 99% of the time.

Let’s repeat this 10,000 times.  Now you are getting into people who are either less likely to donate or who will likely give smaller gifts.  Your revenues per mailing sent will still be very good — it will more than pay for itself by a wide margin — but not as good as that first person.

Now repeat 100,000 times.  The potential donors are getting even more marginal here.  But your expenses have barely gone down.

This is diminishing marginal returns in action.  As you try to reach more people and grow, your outreach becomes more probabilistic and less profitable.  

But it’s still profitable. (In the real world, you would hopefully be looking at this along the donor axis rather than the piece axis, asking if each piece added to lifetime value, but let’s not gum up the thought experiment).

If you had a magic box into which you could put $1, and get $1.10 in lifetime value out, should you do it?  Many of we fundraisers would be putting money into that box like a rat designed to get a, um, pleasurable experience when it pushed a level.  And we’d be right to.  More money = more mission.

But by focusing on the cost of fundraising, CN would have you cut off at the 10,000 mark (or not to mail at all).  Less money, fewer donors, less mission.

That’s the starvation cycle in action on the fundraising side of things.  And it’s made even worse by Charity Navigator’s stubborn refusal to allow for joint cost allocation of joint fundraising/programmatic activities, which we’ll cover tomorrow.