Charity Navigator Celebrity Supporters & Events

Charity Navigator was founded, in 2001, on the premise that people are amazingly generous and derive great satisfaction from helping others, but are not always sure how to help. Its founders envisioned an unbiased source of information that would assist givers from every state, and with every type of charitable interest, in finding a charity to support.

Today, Charity Navigator is the nation’s largest and most-utilized independent evaluator of charities. Using an objective, numbers-based rating system they have assessed the financial health of over 5,000 of America’s charities. Millions of people visit their website annually resulting in our ratings influencing an estimated $10 billion of charitable giving in 2008.

Charity Navigator’s rating system examines two broad areas of a charity’s financial health — how it functions day to day and how well positioned it is to sustain its programs over time. Each charity is then awarded an overall rating, ranging from zero to four stars. To help donors avoid becoming victims of mailing-list appeals, each charity’s commitment to keeping donors’ personal information confidential is assessed. Among the site’s many additional features are listings of the CEO’s salaries, opinion pieces by Charity Navigator experts and donation tips.

TIME Magazine called Charity Navigator “One of America’s 50 Coolest Websites.” The site is a two-time Forbes award winner for “Best of the Web,” was selected by Reader’s Digest as one of the “100 Best Things about America,” was singled out by Kiplinger’s Financial Magazine as “One of the Best Services to Make Life Easier.”