In a recent episode of the Tangle podcast, CharityWatch CEO, Laurie Styron, talked with Ari Weitzman about what sets CharityWatch apart from other charity evaluators and why not all “easy” ways to give are in donors’ best interests. The conversation explores the limitations of automated charity ratings, the risks of charity checkout donations, and why deeper analysis matters for donors who want real impact.

Listen to the full interview, where Laurie shares candid insights into how CharityWatch approaches accountability, transparency, and donor protection.

How CharityWatch Differs From Other Raters

“Our mission has always been steadfast…We want to make sure that people actually get the information they need to make informed giving decisions.”

“Charity financial reporting is just notoriously inaccurate, inconsistent, incomplete, and incomparable, especially when you’re just looking at the tax filings. There’s a number of online databases that rate hundreds of thousands of charities, and that would work ok if the underlying reporting was reliable. But it’s not.

“Not only is it unreliable because a lot of charities lie in their unaudited tax filings…and those automated ratings are based on the tax filings, but they’re just incomplete due to the complexity of charity financial reporting.“

“At CharityWatch we actually have degreed accountants who do a very deep analysis of independent audited financial statements, all of the tax filings of the legal entities included in those statements…[and] we make adjustments for inaccuracies, incomplete data, data that charities report differently from year to year even though it’s the same activity, and then incomparable data…because there’s a lot of different accounting methodologies that charities can use to present their financial reporting, and if you just take those numbers at face value without making the information comparable, you’re not going to be able to come up with ratings that are comparable…that consistently reflect, ‘if I donate $100 to this organization, how will it really be used?”

“So, unfortunately, as much as it would be great to be able to run a tax form through a formula and spit out a reliable rating, it just isn’t possible. And that’s why we exist as a true watchdog versus just a rating organization.”

“We can hope in the future that as AI becomes more reliable, or certain automated techniques become more reliable, hopefully there will be some things that we can implement to make portions of the rating process more efficient. But until the underlying data is reliable and doesn’t need a lot of adjustments, it’s always going to be a somewhat manual process to get to the bottom of how donations are being used.”

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