Ken Berger, CEO of Charity Navigator, Leaves Abruptly

Photo by Tim Gamory

Ken Berger, who led the country’s most prominent nonprofit watchdog, Charity Navigator, for almost seven years, abruptly left his job this week after the board decided to find a leader with more expertise in technology.

“Charity Navigator has been going through a planning process and doing a lot of thinking about where we’re headed next,” Mr. Berger said in an interview. “As part of that, the organization is increasingly seeing itself as a technology company.”

John (Pat) Dugan, Charity Navigator’s co-founder and board chairman, confirmed that the board is looking for new skills as the watchdog expands its work to start rating charities on how well they measure their impact, an effort known as Charity Navigator 3.0. He called Mr. Berger a “real people person” but added, “We’re on the brink of something really big with Charity Navigator 3.0, and the tech needs are going to be enormous and the sophistication needs to be there.”

‘Parting as Friends’

Charity Navigator, created in 2001, evaluates more than 8,000 charities in areas including financial health and accountability and awards them from zero to four stars, posting its analyses online. The group is frequently consulted by individuals who want to know where to give, for example after a disaster, and Mr. Berger has been quoted in countless media reports on issues like how to avoid unscrupulous charities or determine whether a chief executive is overpaid.

Mr. Berger, formerly a nonprofit leader working in areas including homelessness and health care, was named the watchdog’s second chief executive in 2008. He said he and Charity Navigator were “parting as friends,” and he will continue working on a project to produce an e-book under contract with the publishing company Wiley, with a working title of Charity That Counts: the Charity Navigator Guide to Intelligent Giving.
He said he will also consider consulting work.

The nonprofit world has a love-hate relationship with Charity Navigator, which is now embarking on an ambitious effort to double its 14-member staff and increase the number of charities it rates to 10,000 by 2016. Many charities proudly display “Charity Navigator Four Star Charity” logos on their home pages. But others fault the group for perpetuating the notion that donors should evaluate charities based on how much they spend on overhead and using unfair methodology.

Steven Nardizzi, chief executive of the Wounded Warrior Project, for example, has been leading a campaign to get charities to ignore the watchdog, saying his group could never had grown as quickly as it has if it had paid attention to the Charity Navigator’s message that nonprofits should keep fundraising costs low.

More Tech Expertise on the Board

Mr. Berger and Mr. Dugan both noted that Charity Navigator had been working to increase the number of board members from technology companies, for example bringing on people from AOL, IBM, and Viacom Media Networks. They are providing valuable help, Mr. Dugan said, but “our management has to be up to speed with them.”

Mr. Berger’s exit was news to some of his peers. “We’re all quite surprised,” said Lindsay Nichols, senior director of marketing and communications at GuideStar, a service that publishes a wide range of data about charities. “It seems like the end of an era.”

Ms. Nichols said Mr. Berger’s role was critical in formulating a “letter to donors” that GuideStar published with Charity Navigator and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance in 2013 urging people to look beyond overhead costs when judging a charity. “He knew that impact needed to be part of nonprofit assessment,” she said.

“Charity Navigator 3.0 will be his ultimate legacy,” said Eric Walker, a grants-management consultant and adviser to the global-health charity Path, along with Mr. Berger’s general efforts to move donors beyond examining just financial data. But Mr. Walker, who is advising the watchdog on results reporting, said he has been pressing Mr. Berger to update the methodology it uses to evaluate charity finances, for example the way it scores on overhead costs and penalizes charities that aren’t growing. He said Mr. Berger was “open minded” about his suggestions and they had planned to talk about it next week.

Charity Navigator, which reported $1.6 million in revenue in 2013, relying mostly on contributions from individual donors, is planning to finance its expansion by raising more money from people who use the site.

Mr. Dugan said the watchdog plans to hire a search firm to find a replacement for Mr. Berger. It will not appoint an interim chief executive but has named an acting chief operating officer, Tim Gamory.