Give but only after due diligence
There are times, when a natural disaster like an earthquake or floods or fire, wreaks havoc and when you watch the images on TV, your natural human instinct wants you to reach out and help. And for those who cannot get away and volunteer, which is the best form of service, we want to donate money and appease out guilt. But there are devils walking around in the garb of humans, who take away these donations, not allowing a single penny to reach the needy. You contribute in kind – clothes, blankets, medicines, food, water and other necessities. How do you know that it is reaching the right place where it is meant to? Then there are scores of websites, through whom you can make donations. Once again, how do you know that the website is not a fraud?
Well, we don’t know about materials reaching the right place and person but there is a tool which you can choose to check the veracity of the website. This is again a website – Charity Navigator which helps you monitor the NGOs – it has rated some 8000 charities on the site. The data is available to prospective donors, much of it free and easy to find online. Within minutes you can get data on an organization’s program expenses, fundraising, assets and executive compensation. We even come to know if the NGO has diverted assets. It publishes ‘donor advisory’ on organizations with serious charges filed against them or with questionable financial reporting.
There are many more such websites and each follows its own way of rating and grading these NGOs. Like Wise Giving Alliances – it has a set of tough questions which the NGO needs to answer and these are displayed. Philanthropedia gets experts in the field to comment and recommend, while Give Well puts out only 8 international aid groups, which according to it, offer, “outstanding evidence-based results.”
If we do not monitor our charities like the way we monitor our stocks, there is something fundamentally wrong in the way we perceive our value for money. We do not have such a service in India yet but surely, it is a business opportunity then? If companies fixed deposits can be rated, why not charity organisations. Charity has become big business and if we are ‘givers’, due diligence is a must.