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$3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

charitysense.com

41–50 of 88 posts

Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

#41

It looks like a lot of the monies in that chart are for wages and admin. That's not the worst thing. Many charities spend their money on doing things for the betterment of society and those people need to be paid a salary for their work. If there's a charity that cleans up parks, I would assume their wage expenses would be high to pay for the people doing the cleanup work. Not saying that there's not grift in the non…

Indeed, what higher purpose is there except to pay oneself. At sufficiently low levels of productivity, one can consume arbitrary amounts of charitable donations. In fact, the ideal charity is a large vote bloc that is paid to clean parks. A tough job, a hard job, and one that requires back breaking labor of 4 sq. ft. a day.

Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

#42
post #37
post #28

"only 8 cents of every dollar shows up as direct aid and grants" That's an extremely misleading statement. For instance, a food bank giving away food to a pantry does not count as "direct aid and grants" (at least, if they're defining that as "Grants and other assistance to domestic individuals." from the I-990" ). The salary for the warehouse worker operating the food bank is also not counted in that 92%. Other cher…

The problem is there is no guarantee the warehouse worker at a food bank is doing anything of value. So we can’t assume such things are productive without direct evidence.

I think the material point of HN User Yuliyp's comment is that the organization claiming to be providing us with "Charity Sense", for some reason is not providing us all of the data we need to make sense of charities. Even worse, it seems to be deliberately disingenuous in presenting the data it does give us.

At least provide explanations of why certain things are included or excluded from the numbers they're presenting. Why are hospitals and universities lumped in with the food bank in the first place for instance? When you remove them, the numbers and percentages radically change. Not only that, it doesn't feel like the average person sees a food bank and a university, or a hospital, (and certainly not a university hospital), as the same sort of "charity". When you start digging deeper into the numbers, it just looks like they were lumped in to make the less resourced charities like food banks look bad.

Maybe there was some other reason they had for using this amalgamation? But they should be forthcoming with what that reason was.

Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

#44
post #13

For anyone even more skeptical of where your money goes when you donate to a nonprofit, there are plenty of resources out there for researching this. CharityNavigator is a popular one, but I donate primarily to GiveWell: https://www.givewell.org

But which is more trustworthy? We need a charity watcher-watcher to tell us.

The organization I work for does something similar and positively evaluated GiveWell in November 2025 (see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U9H34ui_hvnPOwvsvcZF3VCC... )

Personally, the more I look into GiveWell the more I think it's an amazing way to donate

Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

#46
post #42
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is there is no guarantee the warehouse worker at a food bank is doing anything of value. So we can’t assume such things are productive without direct evidence.

I think the material point of HN User Yuliyp's comment is that the organization claiming to be providing us with "Charity Sense", for some reason is not providing us all of the data we need to make sense of charities. Even worse, it seems to be deliberately disingenuous in presenting the data it does give us. At least provide explanations of why certain things are included or excluded from the numbers they're present…

> Why are hospitals and universities lumped in with the food bank in the first place for instance?

Ask the IRS / congress, this isn’t some arbitrary grouping it’s what charity means in the US.

I do think it’s worth asking that question, but ask it of the people who can do something about it.

Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

#47
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with a large number of these so called "legitimate" charities and after what I saw I will never give a penny to any non-profit. You will have far, far more impact figuring out something you care about and directly spending $100 to accomplish that than giving $5000 to any of these organizations.

In what respect did you work with them? What is your main complaint? As far as I know, top GiveWell charities give malaria nets and stuff and it saves lives at fairly efficient rates.

Malaria nets are band-aids, what really needs to happen is building up institutions and infrastructure that make the nets unnecessary.

Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

#48
post #10

Strangely, what they're selling is some kind of automated surveillance camera system.[1] "Whatever you funded, we can monitor it." [1] https://charitysense.com/#how-it-works

I think every organization (hi, Flock) selling something like this should be required to install it on their own premises first.

Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

#49
There's a mistake I see in the comments here that "non-profit" = "charity". There are a large collection of non/not for-profits that are not even remotely in the charity business. Some of these companies have long legacies that stretch back to academic labs spun out of major U.S. educational institutions.

I've worked for two such companies in my career (and partnered with a few others) and both of them were really just normal businesses that used their non-profit status as part of their business model. They used that status to position themselves as an objective second party to various governments and businesses and signal trust. They also internally represent themselves as something different from commercial businesses, just with a weird way of mopping up profit at the end of the fiscal year. At one I was a researcher and the other a low-level executive.

At the working level, both paid slightly under comparable jobs in the private sector, were often very top heavy, and spent lavishly on facilities and had large internal R&D programs that often went nowhere but acted like overamped hands-on training programs that expressed themselves in additional expertise they could offer their clients without having to turnover staff.

I often had multiple personal offices, subsidized mid-level restaurant quality lunches, laboratories, assistants, and research budgets stretching into the low millions of dollars. This was in addition to the regular work we were contracted out to do, which was often either direct work on fairly cutting-edge S&T like programs or providing special advisory and expertise services to those same customers.

All of the companies I know in this space are also fairly top-heavy with, executive and administrative pay helps sop up any profit.

The law requires these companies to report quite a bit of information about their financials into the public space every year [1]. Some of the executives make quite extraordinary pay.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/

Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

#50

yes, what we need is for charities to operate on a quarterly reporting cycle, so that their administrative overhead increase, and (like public companies) they can be myopically focused on short-term performance.

I noticed you use the word charity - which invokes an image of giving those in need food, money, or care.

The vast majority of non-profits are political and social lobbying efforts. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask them to fill out a form.

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