Charity Navigator Gives Accelerated Cure Project 4 out of 4 stars

Accelerated Cure Project just got the highest rating from nonprofit watchdog Charity Navigator.

Now before we go tooting our own horn over this, I want to point out my opinion of these sorts of rating agencies: I'm not too impressed with them. I'm all for fiscal responsibility in nonprofits, and I can say from inside knowledge that organizations that are getting 4's via these systems are not being fiscally responsible, but it is only a small part of what donors should be concerned with.

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If an organization had 99% overhead and cured cancer, they would be rated poorly by these metrics, while one that had 10% overhead and cured nothing would be rated highly. How does that make sense?

Also, there is only one rating scale and it compares 50-year old billion dollar charities to 5-year old sub-million dollar charities. I'll tell you this - the financials of each are so different that any comparison is meaningless.

The correct way to do this is to measure progress against stated goals. Did they say what they were going to do? Did they do it? Then you can use financials to break the tie between equally effective organizations by choosing the more efficient.

As a donor, your goal should be to finance social good that you believe in. Thus you need an organization to say what they do (in a measurable way) and to report their progress. You can then pick the organizations that do the things you think need doing.

Of course that is more difficult than putting some numbers off a public tax form into a spreadsheet and spitting out a single number. But that's why it would have more value.

In the meantime, we'll happily display our little 4-star logo because it appeases a large number of donors who don't feel qualified to judge which nonprofits are worth investing in.