June 1, 2010 

Dear Valued Friend of Charity Navigator,

I’m excited to tell you that our dream of the next generation of Charity Navigator is now well on the way to becoming reality. I’d like to share two important developments that I hope will encourage you to support our efforts to deepen our analysis of charities and give you even better information to help you make your donation decisions.

Donate Online Simply choose one of the methods below to make a secure, online credit card donation to Charity Navigator. $ $

First, I am proud to report that we have received a $75,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to assist in our work to enhance our rating system. CN 2.0 will provide you with a three dimensional view of every charity you are considering. In addition to our financial analysis, we will be adding two new dimensions - accountability/transparency and effectiveness/results. The latter dimension is an enormous undertaking, and funding from this major foundation, regarded as top experts in charity analysis, will provide significant leverage as we seek support from other foundations to bring this work to scale.  

Second, we have just sent a survey out to solicit feedback from a sampling of charities and donors, on the prototype of our new accountability/transparency dimension.  We anticipate that this new dimension of our rating system will begin to be reflected in an information tab for individual charities starting on July 1st of this year. It will take some time to add this information for every charity we evaluate, but once it’s accomplished we will “flip the switch” and the data will be reflected in each charity’s star rating (by mid-2011).

So, we need your help to get the job done!  You can provide critical support for our ongoing work and for the challenging work ahead.  Charity Navigator 2.0 will be a state-of-the-art tool for social investors (donors with their eyes wide open). We hope you will help us to make it happen.

I look forward to your standing with us in this vital undertaking and a gift of any size is deeply appreciated!

All the best,

Ken Berger

President and CEO