The title of the series is “America’s Worst Charities.” This is a collaborative effort from the Tampa Bay Times, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and CNN.
Don’t know how many words are in the first report, but it took fifteen clicks to page down the article on my monitor.
The report accumulates a list of what is labeled the 50 worst charities in the U.S.
If you ever check in with my blog, you will definitely want to read the Tampa Bay Times reports in detail.
Here’s some links for you:
- Part 1 – America’s 50 worst charities rake in nearly $1 billion for corporate fundraisers – very long story.
- Interactive database – contains a list of the 50 charities. Each one has a separate page that gives a short summary. There is a detailed link on each summary that gives more background, highlights of financial data for the last 10 years, and links to the last 10 Form 990s for each charity.
- Methodology – How we identified America’s 50 worst charities. You can quibble with the methodology if you wish and point out how you would have done it slightly different. However, the methodology looks quite reasonable at first glance.
- Summary page – America’s Worst Charities – Contains links to several parts of the story.
Several observations:
The reporters have the last decade’s worth of 990s for each of the charities available at the Tampa Bay Times website. A decade for 50 NPOs.
The summary page says part 2 on failure of regulation will run on June 7 and part 3 focusing on one family who runs multiple charities will run on June 13.
This is a collaboration between three competing news organizations: Tampa Bay Times, the Center for Investigative Reporting and CNN. I don’t know the range of implications of that kind of cooperation, but I think that is a very big deal.
I can only see one charity in the 50 that appears to be faith-based. There may be more that aren’t apparent from the name.
There is a huge amount of ground these reporters could cover, just based on what is present in the detail reports of the organizations but not covered with more than a brief comment here and there.
Possible feature articles I could see in the future:
- Joint cost allocation
- Functional expense allocation
- Variance power
- Valuation of GIKs
I’ll guess there are several dozen of the charities which by themself would provide enough material to generate one detailed investigative report.
You might want to get a big cup of coffee before you click over to the Tampa Bay Times site for a while.