2022: A Celebration of 20 Years

As an organization who strives to be relevant, current and useful to our 11+ million users, there was a lot to keep up with last year.  The Ukraine relief effort, which lept into place following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, stimulated over 41,000 donations to the 47 highly rated charities from our Where To Give Now list, and deployed about $5.5 million dollars to this effort. The Roe vs. Wade reversal in the US Supreme Court in June also led to increased giving. Charity Navigator’s curated list of 45 nonprofits, focused on both sides of the issue, saw about 3,000 donations and almost $300,000 reach this issue. These are two examples of many situations we responded to over the last year. Sadly there were several mass shootings, and significant climate-related disasters in our country and abroad, and in each case, we were there to help you find the highly rated organizations addressing the issues at hand. On a more positive note, the decline in COVID-19 infections led to significantly less traffic and giving to pandemic relief, as the need had subsided. 

November’s launch was a success and was also quickly followed by some challenges, which slowed us down a bit for GivingTuesday, but again we worked through it, stabilized, bolstered our systems, and successfully closed the year serving millions of donors in their end-of-year giving. There’s a great deal to explore and discover in the new site, but for me, the coolest thing we did was transform the search into a much more powerful and intuitive feature that allows one to search on category and cause, filter results on the same as well as rating values, number of beacons populated, geographic region and more.

Here’s a quick example for you: I’m interested in ensuring that people in Springfield, Missouri who need food can get it and I want to support a highly rated food bank providing food aid. I also want to limit the results to 3 and 4-Star charities and ensure that all elements of the rating (beacons) have been scored.

If you look at the image below - you can see that through the filters I have set, I have reduced the options to two charities. From here, I’d click on their profile and make a choice about which one to support. As I am interested in Springfield specifically, my research is done and I complete the process by clicking on the Donate button, to proceed to Charity Navigator’s Giving Basket and complete the transaction.

If I wished to take this several steps further to make an even greater impact, I could search for the same nonprofits on our volunteering site powered by Golden, our partner in this effort. With a Golden account, I’d be able see what in-person or virtual volunteer opportunities were available. Another option could be to find and join a Giving Circle aligned with combating food insecurity. Thanks to our partnership with Grapevine and Philanthropy Together, donors have access to over 2,500 giving circles making a difference in the world across a variety of causes. 

We will keep refining and improving features like this so that you really can find an impactful organization that is focused on the things you care about most. 

As we ease into 2023, we’re taking a moment to pause and look back at our successes and failures of the last year. I hope you agree with me that there has been tremendous progress and improvement at Charity Navigator. And there is so much more to do. Our focus for the year to come will center on continued execution against our strategic plan and smoothing out some rough edges in the work we’ve just completed. We’ll find ways to make it easier and more effective for nonprofits to provide ratings information to us and others in the sector, so more nonprofits have a higher number of beacons evaluated for their rating. We are pushing forward to continuously improve the quality and quantity of our ratings, transform the user experience and make impactful giving easier for everyone.  Thank you for being a part of the journey with us.

Warmly,