Charity Navigator Awards EdChoice Its Highest Rating
We’re a pretty humble lot here at EdChoice, but we’re proud of the work we do and our reputation as a standard-bearer in the K–12 educational choice movement.
When someone gives us a pat on the back for our financial health, transparency and accountability, we might blush a little bit, but we definitely want to share the good news: We’ve once again been awarded a four-star rating—the highest rating—by Charity Navigator!
Charity Navigator calls itself the nation’s largest and most-utilized evaluator of charities. The organization’s professional analysts have examined tens of thousands of non-profit financial documents to help donors and prospective donors. The result is an objective, numbers-based rating system used to assess more than 8,000 of America’s charities. Here’s how Charity Navigator determines how many stars an organization receives:
“Our ratings are not rankings. We do not identify the best performing charity in each of our performance categories. Nor do we assign ratings to charities based on where they fall in a top-to-bottom ranking, so that a charity’s score in a metric is equal to its rank. We believe that rating charities according to rankings would mislead givers and treat charities unfairly.
“Instead of ranking charities, our ratings are qualitative designations. After analyzing how more than 8,000 charities function financially, we define qualitatively distinct ranges of financial performance. For example, we believe that charities which spend less than 10% of their budgets on fundraising all perform in a financially exceptional way. Whether they spend 1% or 9%, we score all of those charities equally assigning a score of 10 in that metric.”
Many non-profits like to say they’re mission-driven. Our budget bears that out: slightly more than 85 percent of the money we spend goes toward program-related activities. That includes our work on educational choice programs at the state level, along with training and outreach activities that help spread the word. It also includes the top-notch original research we produce throughout the year.
When it comes to the way we operate, we’ve got a great team that’s focused on spreading the word about school choice in a way that’s transparent and approachable. In a world of “fake news” and political drama, we always strive to be the honest broker in the room.
Naturally, we want to thank Charity Navigator for giving us a four-star rating this year, but we also want to thank our charitable donors, who support our core mission with resources that have helped us build a strong, respected organization over the past two decades—with an even brighter future ahead.
Without their contributions, we wouldn’t be able to engage in the work we’re doing to help more families have access to more K–12 schooling options across America. We’re incredibly proud of all that we’ve been able to accomplish together and everything that’s yet to come.
