Breaking Ranks with the Chronicle 400

The current methodology for ranking charities overemphasizes United Way and minimizes some other fundraising powerhouses. 

Every year, the Chronicle of Philanthropy puts together its list of the 400 charity organizations with the most private support.  It's just a list, but looking through it this year, it occurred to me that the choices made in the computing the rankings reflect a certain image of what philanthropy entails.  We want charity to be about social services and helping the disadvantaged, yet the inconvenient truth is that charity has more to do with universities and hospitals.  The list reflects more of what we would like charity to be than what it actually is. 

So again this year, the Chronicle has chosen to aggregate the 1,326 United Way chapters as a single organization, making United Way appear to be the largest recipient of private donations.  The Chronicle claims justification for lumping together these fiercely autonomous local United Way campaigns because the national United Way has adopted some financial standards.  Yet the Chronicle itself notes that less than half of the chapters have adopted the current fundraising strategy advocated by the national office.  It's not the monolithic structure they would have us believe. 

And we have already posted about the extreme variation after Katrina in United Way campaign results in large urban centers, from a 17% decline in Las Vegas to a 25% increase in Atlanta.  The various campaigns are as different as the cities they serve and show wide variation in effectiveness.  It's very misleading to present the most quintessentially local fund raising drive in the US as a national campaign. 

And if the United Way is treated as a single fundraising entity, then it seems to me that there are other organizations that should be treated the same way.  I've prepared an annotated list of the Chronicle 400 that shows other groups that could aggregated in the same fashion as the United Way:

Let's start with public universities.  State governments sponsor higher education institutions. The system could be considered as a single fundraising entity: government.  With that perspective, it's a shock to discover that state government is the largest recipient of voluntary charitable contributions in the U.S., raising $9.9 billion, two and a half times as much as the United Way system.

The $9.9 billion figure comes from a table from the 2006 Chronicle of Education almanac, available only with a subscription.  The comparable data from 2004 is available on line here. 

It may be going too far to group all state universities as one, but how about at least considering California universities as a single unit?  The California University System actually produces a consolidated report that shows public contributions of $1.1 billion, which would put the system at #5 on the list.  As it is, the Chronicle list includes the individual campuses at San Francisco (#40), Los Angeles (#43), Berkeley (#73), San Diego (#125), Davis (#159), Irvine (#285), and Santa Barbara (#318). 

Currently the Chronicle reports the Public Broadcasting Service (#60) headquarters separately from the handful of local stations that also make the list, like WGBH Boston (#135), WNET New York (#156), WETA Washington (#258), KCET Los Angeles (#265), and KQED San Francisco (#375).  This doesn't give a true picture of collective fund raising accomplished by the entire network of 348 stations. 

Likewise National Public Radio (#208) and Minnesota Public Radio (#378) make the list, but this selective approach ignores the 800 other stations in the NPR network whose fund drives are much more a part of the US fundraising (and volunteering) scene than the Muscular Dystrophy Association (#81) telethon. 

With food banks, it seems to me there is a different issue: double counting.  America's Second Harvest (#19) gets credit for all the corporate food donations that it brokers (even though ASH itself doesn't handle any of the food).  And yet also included on the list are local food banks in Phoenix (#280), Chicago (#312), Los Angeles (#344), Oregon (#345), New Jersey (#352), and Kansas City (#365), which must be including those corporate food donations in their totals.  How many times are we going to count that can of spaghetti sauce?

Then there's the case of Harvard (#18).  The Chronicle 400 breaks out separately the fund raising for Harvard's teaching hospitals: Partners Healthcare System (#66—itself is a combination of Massachusetts General and Brigham & Women's Hospital), Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (#129), Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (#171), and Children's Hospital Boston (#231).  All of these together would put Harvard at #5 with over a billion in private fundraising, just behind the American Red Cross (and just slightly smaller than the California University system we discussed above).  The precedent here is Johns Hopkins (#36), whose totals appear to include both the university and its teaching hospital. 

And after all that, it's just a quibble that there are separate entries for the Tides Foundation (#196) and the Tides Center (#368) in San Francisco.  Reported together, the two would rank #132.

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[バーバリーマフラー]

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[ティンバーランド]

ティンバーランド付近住民らが数日前から目撃したのも同じ男とみられ、近くの女性も取材に「事件が発覚する何日か前の午前８時ごろ、尾崎さん宅の玄関門扉前に段ボールを持って立つ黒っぽい服装の不審な男を見た」と話した。東側の別の門扉の前には、バイクが止められていたという。

　ティンバーランド一方、堺市南区の歯科医師の妻、田村武子さん（６７）が行方不明になっている事件に絡んで窃盗容疑で逮捕された西口宗宏容疑者（５０）とよく似た男が尾崎さんの事件があった日、同市内の農協支所で、尾崎さんのキャッシュカードを使い残高を照会。その際、支所付近の防犯カメラには、黒っぽい服装の男が黒いバイクで乗り付ける姿が記録されていた。

　府警は、西口容疑者方から黒い原付きバイクを押収し、関連の有無を調べている。