The BBB Wise Giving Alliance, a major charity watchdog, has released a list of its standards that national charities most commonly fail to meet when the alliance evaluates them against its “20 Standards for Charity Accountability.”
“Insufficient transparency, inadequate board activity, and the lack of assessment of charity effectiveness account for the most failures in compliance,” the alliance said in a statement.
The Wise Giving Alliance said that evaluation of the charities that provided it with requested information in the past two years found that 56 percent of charities met all 20 standards while groups in the remaining 44 percent did not meet one or more of the standards.
“Unfortunately, it’s evident that many charities have more work to do to satisfy the expectations of donors,” said Art Taylor, chief executive of the Wise Giving Alliance.
Following are the alliance standards in which the “most frequent deficiencies” were found:
• Annual Reports: Have an annual report available to all, on request, that includes recommended program, governance, and financial disclosures.
• Effectiveness Policy: Have a board policy of assessing, no less than every two years, the organization’s performance and effectiveness and of determining future actions required to achieve its mission.
• Effectiveness Report: Submit to the organization’s governing body, for its approval, a written report that outlines the results of the performance and effectiveness assessment and recommendations for future action.
• Board Meetings: A minimum of three evenly spaced meetings per year of the full governing body with a majority in attendance, with face-to-face participation. (One of these meetings can be a conference call of the full board.)
• Web Site Disclosures: “Include on any charity Web sites that solicit contributions the same information that is required for annual reports, as well as the mailing address of the charity and electronic access to its most recent IRS Form 990 [federal informational tax return].
“The silver lining to this cloud is that many charities have shown us that, after the issues are brought to their attention, they have been able to take steps to meet these standards,” said Mr. Taylor.
0 Responses to Charity Watchdog Releases List of Reasons Groups Fail to Meet Standards
jpilsner - July 13, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Rob: I think this will be of interest to you. Adrianne: There is also a recommendation for the web-site. Joyce
nasfaa - July 13, 2010 at 3:54 pm
Joyce, your colleagues didn’t receive this – you need to use the email function to send it to them.
rocketpreacher - July 28, 2010 at 11:49 pm
Not all charities are required to file form 990. Religious charities are exempt from this. Some of them go ahead and do it, but that is truly giving some control away from the faith-based organization back to the government that our Constitution did not want them to have.It would be very good for those religious charities though to create a document that looks like the 990 but is not one and fill it out and publish this so that people who worry for nothing would be able to discover that the churches are in fact being faithful. God calls us all to transparency and accountability. Even Jesus was accountable to His Father. He said as much!Reverend Charles Albert Cunningham