2009/10/9 Gregory Kohs thekohser@gmail.com:
Nathan asks:
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I'm curious what importance you attach to the Charity Navigator rating, and how you think it is (or should be) relevant to the operations of the WMF. Care to explain?
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Thank you for asking, Nathan. As always, I am eager to provide a prompt and direct response to questions, though that is not standard practice in some circles.
I make charitable gifts each year that typically total between $3,000 and $5,000. Some of my strict rules for charitable giving include (1) don't ever give on the basis of only a telephone solicitation or an in-person intercept, and (2) don't ever give without first looking up the organization on both GuideStar and Charity Navigator. If another organization can be found that serves a similar need, but is doing so more efficiently with its dollars, then my donation goes to that organization, and other less stringent donors are free to fling their money at a more inefficient organization.
For example, to help further the cause of truth and knowledge on the Internet, this year I made a donation to ProCon.org:
http://www.procon.org/aboutus.asp#Financial
...even though it was not yet listed in Charity Navigator, I could still make a decision in part because I appreciated that 87% of their expenses were spent on program services, as opposed to 66% at the Wikimedia Foundation.
Therefore, for me, GuideStar and Charity Navigator are important tools for me to help decide where my charitable contributions will be directed in a given year.
I wouldn't give money to an organization spending 54K$ in 2008 to pay 8 people. 562,5USD per month, those guys must be starving !
Or some of their salaries are considered as "programm"... But I wouldn't dare thinking you didn't looked at the financial report beside the nice images :)
Anyway, soif we want to have the "stars" what's needed is just to put all the salaries and costs needed to run the servers and improve the software in programm.
Problem solved :)