donations, fees, etc for future reference

[darkoshi]

Looking at this page, I wondered if donating via them would be easier or better than donating to multiple organizations individually:
Charity Navigator's Giving Basket

One of the benefits listed on the above page is "Competitive processing fee", which links to the following page:
Charity Navigator: Donation Processing Fees

That page says that Charity Navigator uses Network for Good as their "donation vendor", and
"Network for Good charges a 4.75% tax-deductible fee", which "is used to pay banks, credit card companies and other administrative costs."
and
"using Network for Good can save your favorite charity money because Network for Good's processing fees are relatively low. Many charities have to pay more to credit card companies."

But it seemed to me that 4.75% wasn't an especially low rate.
This page indicates much lower credit card transaction fees for charities:
Best Ways to Donate to Charity
By the way, it also indicates that debit card fees are much lower than credit card fees.
And by the way, this page indicates that for large donations, sending a check can be better than using a credit card:
Should I give to charity by check or credit card?

This page lists the same concerns as I had about the Network for Good fee amount, along with some clarifications/explanations from a NFG representative.
The GiveWell Blog: Network for what now?
This post is a follow-up to the prior one:
Network for Good roundup

The GiveWell site may be a useful resource, in general. Or at least worth looking at.

Comments

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

We have a weird box o' snacks on the top of the fridge at work, that has some generic charity wording on the front. On the side they have, in very fine print, a breakdown of their donation accounting: overhead, 80%, transportation for refilling the boxes, 17%, amount to charity 3%. Which is funny, because where we work about 60% of the people are actively turned off by the concept of charity and would aggressively avoid anything that mentions it, and of the remainder, everyone is sufficiently appalled at the breakdown that nobody's touched it in months. Now, someone drives out every three months (17%!) and throws away all the contents and replaces them with new contents, which is arguably worse than not having it at all.

[darkoshi]

I suppose those snacks are priced more expensively than comparable ones that you have available? I don't mind, and even appreciate, products that say that they donate a certain percentage of proceeds to charity (which generally is just a few percent or less). But it won't factor much (says my conscious mind) into my decision to buy the product or not.

But yeah, the breakdown on those snacks does sound ridiculous. And if it is labelled specifically for charity, those numbers would turn me off too.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they're at least 20% higher than the official snack machine, and the nature of the charity is entirely unclear.