When the Chronicle started publishing 30 years ago, one of the first things we noticed was the paucity of data — especially recent figures — about key benchmarks in the nonprofit world.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy unveils its new, exclusive ranking. Plus, the data behind the ranking, what’s going on with donor-advised funds, and more.
My fellow editors and reporters realized it was up to us, as one of the first newsrooms dedicated to covering the nonprofit world, to find ways to fill the void. Our primary goal was to inform foundations and other nonprofits with data they could use to improve their work. But we also wanted to help Americans better understand the finances and inner workings of the organizations they supported directly with their checks and indirectly through tax subsidies.
Our first ambitious effort was to rank charities by how much they raise from private sources — individuals, foundations, and companies. We wanted to show which nonprofits were able to draw the most voluntary support, from the wealthiest Americans to the poorest citizens, and to put a spotlight on the nonprofits that demonstrated the most fundraising prowess.
In recent years, nontraditional charities and groups that receive large quantities of donated goods have moved into the top tier, making it hard to draw comparisons from one nonprofit to another. Donor-advised funds — mostly those affiliated with financial institutions like Fidelity and Schwab — have dominated the top 10, and groups like the Task Force for Global Health and Feeding America have been high on the list due to the vast quantities of drugs and food they receive as contributions.
The shakeup we charted over the past few years has helped change the debate over what is truly charitable, and especially vaulted into the spotlight the role of donor-advised funds.
It’s essential in our role as journalists to provide analysis of the most consequential changes in how modern philanthropy works — in this case, to focus on those charities that directly carry out essential missions.
This year’s list is based on the cash and stock that charities receive from individuals, foundations, and corporations — and omits organizations that raise most of their money through donor-advised funds. Those contributions are continuing to grow fast: Fidelity Charitable raised $6.8 billion last year, far outpacing the $3.5 billion United Ways across the country brought in. We took the same approach with community foundations, counting only the dollars they put to use and the money earmarked for their own funds.
We also focused exclusively on cash and stock because that money comes directly from individuals. Donated goods and products are also vital to many charities, but most of those are made at the discretion of an elite group of corporate executives and therefore not a direct way to validate the public’s support for a specific charity.
More about the new list’s approach and far more data are available online at philanthropy.com. Chronicle editors Drew Lindsay, Brian O’Leary, and Ron Coddington took the lead in shaping the approach and poring over numbers submitted by nonprofits nationwide. They had help from many other colleagues in the Chronicle newsroom, especially Tyler Davis, Heather Joslyn, Tim Sandoval, and Scott Seymour. We recognize that the changes we are making will bring cheers from some quarters of the nonprofit world and howls from others, and we welcome all of your feedback on how we can make our rankings more valuable. Drop me a line at stacy.palmer@philanthropy.com.
It’s not just the new version of the fundraising rankings that has me thinking back to the Chronicle’s earliest days. This issue’s opinion section opens with a reflection by Ted Turner on the impact of his $1 billion gift to the United Nations.
Six years before Turner announced his history-making pledge, he summoned Phil Semas, the Chronicle’s founding editor, and me to his suite at the Four Seasons in Washington. He asked us to consider starting a new ranking — one that would be the equivalent of the Forbes 400 in status but that would honor wealthy people who were giving away big chunks of their fortune.
The obsession so many affluent people had with ranking high on the Forbes list, he worried, was giving billionaires incentives only to accumulate money, not to give it away.
His idea and inspiration are the key reason that we now publish the Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest American donors. And without a doubt, the total dollars contributed by America’s billionaires has been on the rise ever since the day Ted Turner stunned the world by announcing on the spur of the moment that he was giving big to help improve the lives of people everywhere.
— Stacy Palmer, Editor
