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Giving Certificates ^TM: Send Greetings With Tzedakah
for Just About Any Occasion.

Send a Giving Certificate^TM. Giving Certificates^TM are great to congratulate that special bar or bat mitzvah, the bride and groom, or to mark any special occasion. Click on the picture below to find out how.

Tzedakah Workshops:
An ideal educational opportunity for your synagogue or organization

Maimonides teaches that tzedakah should be done with more care than any other positive commandment. Tzedakah workshops are an ideal way to learn about the mitzvah of tzedakah and how to perform it in the choicest way. Click on the graphic below to find out more.

Check out this letter from the Five Towns Jewish Times on February 19

Who Will Rate The Raters?

Dear Editor,

I was disappointed to see that a newspaper of the stature of the Five Towns Jewish Times would publish an article that features Charity Navigator ratings (“Ezer Mizion: In Top 11% for Efficient Use of Funds,” February 13).

Charity Navigator’s rating system is fatally flawed. By giving prominence to Charity Navigator, we do a disservice to many worthwhile charities that get low ratings under this meaningless system. That hurts deserving charities and their stakeholders, including the community at large, the charities’ beneficiaries, and donors. Of course, I in no way mean to disparage Ezer Mizion or its wonderful work.

Here are some problems with the Charity Navigator rating system:

1. Charity Navigator lowers ratings for organizations whose revenue is declining and must therefore cut back on programming. But if a worthwhile charity is struggling to raise money, that may be exactly where I want my tzedakah to go.

2. Charity Navigator gives higher scores to organizations that have higher amounts of working capital relative to operating expenses. However, a donor may legitimately want to avoid charities that have large amounts of cash and liquid assets, which may imply that the charity doesn’t know what to do with its money. Jewish tradition discourages the accumulation of large amounts designated for the poor, because the poor always have urgent needs.

3. Charity Navigator gives high marks to organizations that spend the least on overhead. However, research shows that too little spent on overhead can lead to poor management. An article in the December 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review concludes that “the phenomenon most to blame for inefficiencies in nonprofits is…resistance…to supporting overhead… Nonprofits’ most common and pernicious response to this phenomenon is to both underinvest in infrastructure and underreport what they’ve spent.”

4. Financial data tell only a small part of the story. Evaluations of charities should also include consideration of such nonfinancial factors as the quality of programs, the effectiveness of the stewardship of resources, and the ethical behavior of management.

Our organization, Tzedakah, Inc., has prepared the booklet Smart Tzedakah: How to Evaluate Charities Before You Give. It is available free of charge online at www.just-tzedakah.org/resourcesSmartTzedakah.asp. Our website, www.just-tzedakah.org, is slowly working to develop a data bank providing easy-to-read profiles of Jewish tzedakos, and a new Israeli website is doing the same (www.midot.org.il).

For donors who want meaningful evaluations of general (not necessarily Jewish) charities, I suggest the Standards for Excellence Institute (www.StandardsForExcellenceInstitute.org) and the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance (www.give.org).

Ira Kaminow, President, Tzedakah Inc.

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