CharityWatch CEO, Laurie Styron, speaks with ABC
News 5 Cleveland, advising donors to not give in to high pressure tactics
from charity fundraisers this Giving Tuesday.
“’They use high pressure tactics,’ said Styron. ‘One of the things they do is
they design their marketing and fundraising materials very carefully to try to guarantee
that you cannot say no. They have an answer for absolutely everything.’”
A message from CharityWatch CEO/Executive Director, Laurie Styron for
advice on informed giving this holiday season.
While there is no perfect
formula for how any individual person should make their donating decisions, I
would like to offer the following as a guide for your consideration. People
often procrastinate in making donations, not because they don’t care, but because
they don’t know how to start. I hope you find this brief roadmap to giving
helpful today and throughout this holiday season as you consider which
charities to support.
Step
1: What
Causes Do You Care Most About?
You are only one person. You can’t fix the
entire world by yourself. Even the very fortunate among us have limited
resources. Consider which causes are most important to you. Doing so will make
you a more proactive giver. Instead of waiting to be asked and making impulsive
donating decisions, your mindfulness about what you care about will drive you
to be more thoughtful about how you donate, and even more generous.
Step
2: What Can You Afford?
What we can and cannot afford is not always a
logical calculation. Our perceptions in this regard may be shaped by our sense
of hope for the future, feelings of guilt, emotional anxiety in the face of
evocative imagery or sad stories about people or animals who need our help, and
any number of other factors that are more about how we are feeling than they
are about the cold, hard facts of our respective financial positions.
Charities often try to quantify what they can
accomplish with a specific donation amount that helps to put that dollar figure
into perspective, such as being able to feed a child for the same cost as one
cup of coffee per day. These quantifiers help us to think about our individual
resources and spending habits in a way that allows us to incorporate giving
back within the context of what we can afford. It also helps us to reflect on
the philosophical considerations of what we are willing and able to give up in
order to support the causes we care about.
Only you can decide what you can afford. It’s
ok for a charity to ask you to reflect on this question, but it’s not ok for
them to bully you into making donations that are not in your budget. Saying no
to some charities is what allows you to say yes to others. You are not a bad
person for setting boundaries and maintaining control over your budgeting
decisions.
Step
3: Identify Efficient Charities Working in the Causes Important to You.
Whether you care about animal welfare,
injured veterans, cancer research, climate change, homelessness, food
insecurity, social justice, or other causes, what all these causes have in
common is that there are good charities and bad charities working in each of
these cause areas. “Good” and “bad” for purposes of this
discussion are defined as charities that will use your donations efficiently
and effectively, and charities that will not, respectively.
If you know what causes you care about but
aren’t sure which charities will use your donations the way you intend, a good
starting point is CharityWatch’s
List of Top-Rated Charities, which is organized by cause. (This list is periodically refined and expanded).
Step
4: What Programs Do You Care About?
In steps 1 – 3 you thought about what causes
you care about, how much you can afford to donate, and found a list of
efficient charities working in those causes. Chances are you still need a way
to help you whittle down this list before making your final charity selections
and initiating your donations. To do this, consider what types of charitable
programs you want to fund.
For example, a veterans charity may be
operating efficiently, but its programs are not in line with what you most want
to support. One veterans charity might focus primarily on educating the public
about the needs of veterans. Another might have good programs, but these
duplicate the efforts of the Veterans Administration, which is already funded
by our tax dollars. A different veterans charity may offer emergency rent,
utility, and medical bill assistance, while another may conduct a program to
help veterans establish permanent housing.
View the mission of each charity on CharityWatch’s
Top-Rated List by clicking on the name of the charity and
navigating to its profile page. Be sure to also check out the notes compiled by
CharityWatch’s analysts during their evaluations, as well as any articles
published by CharityWatch and other journalists. Each profile page also
includes data on a charity’s governance, transparency, executive pay, and other
useful information. If you still need more information, simply navigate to the
charity’s website using the link provided.
Step
5: Turn Your Intentions Into Actions.
The important final step is to turn your
thoughts and words into actions by making donations. You’ve done your due
diligence in researching charities. Now you are ready to give
thoughtfully.
CharityWatch’s
investigative work and in-depth financial analysis of charity audited financial statements, tax filings, fundraising contracts, legal filings, and other
data used in our evaluations of charities is funded by donations from the
general public. We hope you will consider supporting us by making
a donation today. We also welcome support from foundation and corporate donors