Poll Rates Public Confidence in Charities, Their Programs, and Spending

Almost two-thirds of Americans have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in charities, according to a new Chronicle poll — the first to measure public views on that question since 2008.

More than 80 percent said charities do a very good or somewhat good job helping people. But a significant number expressed concern about their finances: A third said charities don’t spend money wisely, especially on administrative costs, and 41 percent said leaders are paid too much. Half said that when it came to deciding what nonprofits they would support, it was very important that charities spend a low amount on salaries, administration, and fundraising; 34 percent said that was somewhat important.

And 35 percent said they had little or no confidence in charities.

Steady Confidence Levels

The Chronicle poll, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, surveyed 1,000 adults in June, asking several questions identical to those included in polls that Princeton conducted from 2002 to 2008 on behalf of Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University.

The key numbers have barely budged since 2008, when 64 percent said they had a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in charities, compared with 62 percent in the new poll.

That may be good or bad, depending on how you look at it.

“The positive news is that the public confidence has stayed so stable and comparatively high when looking at other sectors,” says Tim Delaney, chief executive of the National Council of Nonprofits.

Fifteen percent of those surveyed said they had a “great deal” of confidence in charitable organizations over all, with 21 percent saying that about charities in their own communities.

Many institutions fared worse in a June Gallup poll: Only 4 percent of respondents said they had a great deal of confidence in Congress, 9 percent in big business, 10 percent in newspapers, and 12 percent in banks, public schools, and organized labor. The top scorers: the military (42 percent) and small business (34 percent).

But to Mr. Light, the numbers confirm the worrisome trends seen in his previous surveys. For example, the percentage of people who say charities do a very good job of helping people has fallen, from 34 percent in 2003 to 25 percent in 2008 and again in 2015.

“That’s the bread and butter of the nonprofit sector,” he says, and its “main distinctiveness.” He adds: “If charitable organizations become identified as just another set of mediocre organizations — a mediocre destination for taxes, funding, and cash — you’ve got a big problem.”

And he wonders why confidence levels are stuck.

“Despite a huge amount of social entrepreneurship, social innovation, and all the attention given to what wonderful things might be happening,” he says, “you’re getting no movement in the indicators.”

Spending Wisely

The Chronicle poll is not the only recent study to detect skepticism about charity spending. The Money for Good 2015 report on the views of people with household incomes of at least $80,000 projected that $22 billion in new giving could be mobilized if charities better understood donor preferences. The top donor concern in that study, named by 49 percent: “how the organization uses my money.”

Hope Neighbor, a partner in the Camber Collective, which published the report, says the study found that many people were skeptical not only of nonprofits but also of beneficiaries. She advises charities to address those doubts head on in fundraising pitches: “We need to begin to say, We know these social issues are complex and difficult to manage; it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t support them.”

Laura Deitrick, interim director of the Institute of Nonprofit Education and Research at the University of San Diego, says her center’s research has found that people think highly of California charities.

In a survey conducted in 2014, for example, 82 percent of Californians said they had a great deal or fair amount of confidence that charities act on the public’s behalf, 85 percent said they provide quality services, and 77 percent said they operate effectively (in all cases, the ratings were higher than for business and government).

But only 69 percent expressed confidence that nonprofits spend money wisely. “It always dips on ‘spend money wisely,’ ” Ms. Deitrick says. “The public doesn’t understand what nonprofits do. We’ve got to do a better job of helping them understand that. They love the high-quality services, they love that nonprofits act on the public’s behalf, but they don’t understand the business model.”

Overhead Concerns

The Chronicle poll found that many Americans still believe donors should favor charities with low administrative and fundraising costs, despite a concerted effort by nonprofit leaders in recent years to dispel the so-called overhead myth. They argue that the pressure to keep such costs low can force charities to skimp on spending that would make them more effective.

“It suggests we have some important education to do to help people understand how to make an informed judgment,” says David Renz, director of the Midwest Center for Nonprofit Leadership at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. “It’s not that administrative costs are all good, but we need to help people discern what the nature of those costs is and how to be a better critical judge of that.”

Public Says Salaries Are Too High

Given the relatively low pay of most nonprofit leaders, some experts were dismayed by the number of people who said salaries are too high. Mr. Delaney of the National Council of Nonprofits calls it an unfair question, contending that Americans would probably say the leaders of banks and corporations are paid too much.

When asked about factors that influence their giving decisions, 68 percent of those who responded to the Chronicle poll said it was very important that a charity have evidence its programs are effective — the highest score of all factors listed. (The other factors, in addition to the 50 percent who favored low overhead spending: The charity gets good ratings from watchdogs, 54 percent; it works on a cause that has affected me or my loved ones, 39 percent; and it only occasionally asks for money, 27 percent.)

The survey didn’t define “evidence,” so it’s tough to know exactly what people look for or how much effort they make to find it. Still, the high number surprised some experts, including Ellie Buteau, vice president for research at the Center for Effective Philanthropy.

“I took that as a positive sign,” she says. “In our research, we have found that most nonprofits say they want to understand their effectiveness. They’re trying to do that but aren’t getting help” from foundations. “If the public views this as important, maybe nonprofits can get more support to do this.”

But she and others see a contradiction between wanting a charity to show proof of effectiveness while also asking it to keep administrative costs low. “If you want the charity to be as effective as possible, you need the best technology, the best people working on it, the best resources to run those programs effectively,” Ms. Buteau says.

On the other hand, maybe donors know what they want and nonprofits are going to have to “meet them where they are,” says Mr. Renz. He quotes Peter Brinckerhoff, the nonprofit-management consultant: “The customer is not always right, but the customer is always the customer, so fix the problem.”

Not everyone is as pessimistic as Mr. Light of New York University, who warned of a “crisis of confidence” in charities when conducting his polls. He concluded that many Americans had become disillusioned by controversy over the way the American Red Cross disbursed money raised for victims of the September 11 attacks and by high-profile scandals in the early 2000s involving charities like the Nature Conservancy and the United Way in the Washington area.

He noted that a quarter of Americans said they had “a lot” of confidence in charities when surveyed in July 2001 by Independent Sector, a coalition of nonprofits and foundations.

That number fell to 18 percent in May 2002, when he conducted a similar survey. The level hasn’t rebounded. And he has long argued that charities should not feel proud when significant percentages report only a “fair” amount of confidence in them or say they do a “somewhat good” job of helping people.

Michael O’Neill, professor emeritus of nonprofit administration at the University of San Francisco, took Mr. Light to task in a 2009 article arguing that it is impossible to conclude that the public has lost confidence in charities because there is little long-term data. Other than asking about organized religion, major pollsters like Gallup ignore the nonprofit world in their confidence surveys.

Mr. O’Neill dissected the findings of Independent Sector’s detailed Giving and Volunteering surveys, conducted annually from 1988 to 2001, saying they showed that people consistently had a higher level of confidence in charities than in government or business.

What’s more, he argued, a true drop in confidence would be accompanied by a drop in giving, but Americans have donated about 2 percent of their disposable income to charity for decades, according to Giving USA studies. “All the data say to me that Americans have a very steady level of confidence in nonprofits,” he said in an interview.

The bottom line for Mr. Light is that much more work is needed to truly understand the issue. “Let’s get a group of foundations together and say we’re going to do some deep research on confidence in the sector: What is it that people like? What would people like to see improved?”

He adds: “I keep coming back to the fact that we don’t know much about the public’s confidence and don’t want to learn. That’s either a sign of blissful ignorance or a sense that the public’s confidence just doesn’t much matter to anyone that matters, meaning our donors, volunteers, mayors, Congress, or the president.”

All data comes from surveys conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International except the July 2001 data, which comes from a survey conducted by Independent Sector. The Chronicle’s 2015 survey interviewed people by landlines and cellphones. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.