If you want your donations to make an impact, being cautious when choosing charities is imperative. CharityWatch CEO, Laurie Styron, speaks with WBUR’s Robin Young (NPR Boston) about common tricks scammers and unethical charities use to siphon your donations away from efficient organizations.
Listen here:
“The mantra that I’m going to repeat throughout our conversation, and this is going to cut down on 90% or more of your risk when donating to charity, and that is, ‘Choose the Charity, Don’t Let The Charity Choose You.’ It helps you avoid high pressure tactics, and it helps make sure that you are supporting the causes most important to you and the charities working most effectively and impactfully in those causes.” — Laurie Styron, CharityWatch CEO
“There’s a huge difference between a legitimate charity and an efficient charity. Charities can legally spend 99% of your donation on overhead without breaking the law.” — Laurie Styron, CharityWatch CEO
“You have to watch out for highly popular causes that are easy to raise money for because that provides the most return on investment for scammers. And it really comes down to paying attention. If you get a solicitation from a cancer charity, a kids charity, an animal charity, a veterans charity, those are the causes you have to be particularly careful about. Don’t let bad actors capitalize on your confusion.” — Laurie Styron, CharityWatch CEO
“If your goal is to donate to a registered 501(c)(3) public charity, there’s really no reason to go through a crowdfunding site to do it. The charity’s website is either going to have a method for you to do it directly there, or they’re going to have instructions for you about how they want you to give.” — Laurie Styron, CharityWatch CEO
“The purpose of a crowdfunding site is to donate money to people or associations of people who are not a legitimate, legally organized charity. And you can do that if you want to do it, but you have to understand that when you donate to a cause that’s not an official charity, or to an individual person, there’s not going to be the same controls in place to understand how your money was ultimately spent.” — Laurie Styron, CharityWatch CEO
“First, most people don’t realize, the person contacting you typically is not an employee of the charity or a volunteer of the charity. They’re typically calling you from a for-profit professional fundraising company that’s taking a huge cut of your donation. So, we generally don’t recommend responding with a donation to telemarketing calls or direct mail letters simply because typically less of your donation ends up at the charity.” — Laurie Styron, CharityWatch CEO
“We find this a lot, especially towards the end of the year. Charities will launch these matching gift campaigns…these matching gift campaigns are typically more semantics than they are actually resulting in your gift being doubled or tripled. Basically, charities will have a pot of money internally, and when you donate they’ll essentially take money out of this internal pot. And most of the time that’s what these matching gift campaigns are. They’re not really outside money actually coming into the organization doubling your gift.” — Laurie Styron, CharityWatch CEO
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