About CharityWatch
Jul 21, 2026
What happens to your donation after you give? In this video, CharityWatch CEO Laurie Styron and analyst Ben Kemper explain how CharityWatch helps donors answer that question through independent, in-depth analysis of charities’ finances. Learn why informed giving requires looking beyond marketing materials and simplistic ratings to understand how charities use the resources entrusted to them.
CharityWatch Was Founded in 1992
Laurie Styron: My name is Laurie Styron. I’m the CEO and executive director of CharityWatch.
CharityWatch was founded in 1992, back when it was extremely difficult to find any information on charities. Things have come a long way since then, but fundamentally what we do has not changed. At the end of the day, our job is to tell you, if I donate $100 to this charity, how much money is really going to be spent on the programs I’m intending to support? The reason that we exist, at CharityWatch, is to empower you with the information you need to make truly informed giving decisions.
Purpose-Driven Work
Ben Kemper: My name is Ben Kemper and I am an analyst here at CharityWatch. I really think that the purpose-driven work is really what guided me to this organization. I really fell in love with the idea of helping people use their money in the most meaningful way each year for their donations. My primary role is to get the ball rolling on all of our ratings. In simplest terms, our ratings measure fundraising efficiency and the amount of money that a charity is spending on their programs versus other things that they have to spend money on.
Legitimate Does Not Necessarily Mean Efficient
Laurie Styron: It’s not enough to know if a charity is legitimate. Due to Supreme Court rulings, a charity can spend 99% of your donation on overhead without breaking the law. You need to understand not only is this a real charity, but how does it operate and will it use my donation efficiently and impactfully?
There’s so much information online about charities and unfortunately a lot of it is just marketing materials, pie charts and ratings that are produced by nonprofit trade associations. And just a lot of information that is by design trying to part you from your donations to support things that you may or may not want to support, to direct dollars to charities that may or may not deserve them, that might not use them efficiently and impactfully.
Digging Deep
Ben Kemper: One thing that donors may not be aware of when it comes to the level of detail required to produce a meaningful rating update is that we sometimes can’t always find it just from researching the financial statements that we use for the rating. Sometimes we may need to inquire with the charity to get more information.
The details of the rating that may often seem small on their surface can sometimes impact the grade that we issue to charities. We need to ask the tough questions of charities because often times those produce the most meaningful results and the most meaningful answers towards issuing a letter grade rating that we feel fully confident in.
Simplistic Formulas Don’t Produce Reliable Data
Laurie Styron: And this is the reason that we have continued to still have a fairly manual process of analyzing charity’s financials, because it’s not enough to run a tax filing through a formula and receive reliable data from that. Our analysis entails obtaining a charity’s audited financial statements. We also obtain the tax filings of the legal entities included in those statements so that we can see a complete picture of how organizations are spending their money, if they have related party transactions, if they have conflicts of interest.
CharityWatch is Fiercely Independent
Laurie Styron: CharityWatch is not funded by industry interests and that makes us extremely unique in the nonprofit sector.
Ben Kemper: Independence is crucial to our work here at CharityWatch because it allows us to remain transparent with our donors and issue a rating update that we feel fully confident in.
Laurie Styron: We apply the same core values to ourselves that we apply in our analysis of other organizations: transparency, independent governance, independent funding, and accountability.
We are not afraid to speak truth to power. We are not afraid to offend industry interests. We’re not here to please charities. We’re not here to fund consultants. We’re here to help donors.
Where You Direct Your Donations Really Matters
People should feel good about giving. That’s something that we want to protect. We want people to keep making the world a better place and we want them to feel good about doing it.
We want donors to feel confident when they donate to charity because that means they’re going to keep doing it. You don’t need to stop donating. You just need to empower yourself with information. And that is a big thing that CharityWatch exists to provide to you.
If you come to our site at charitywatch.org, you can avoid a lot of the most common mistakes in giving by empowering yourself with the information you need to make informed giving decisions.
At the end of the day, these aren’t just numbers. These are people who need help. Environment that needs to be saved. These are causes that people care about.
This isn’t just dollars as an end unto themselves. Where you direct your donations really really matters.
Will You Help CharityWatch Continue Our Important Work?
As the only independent charity watchdog organization in the United States, CharityWatch relies on your support to fund our in-depth research and analysis in order to bring you the unbiased charity ratings and other information you rely on to help you make more informed giving decisions. We are not directly or indirectly funded by nonprofit industry interests.
We hope you will consider making a donation today so that we can continue to speak openly and critically and call out wrongdoing when we see it without concern for special interests cutting our funding. CharityWatch is a small organization and your donations are noticed, needed, and greatly appreciated. Thank you for giving wisely!