Charity accountability received an increasing amount of public attention during the past year, due in part to a public hearing on Charity Oversight and Reform held on June 22, 2004 by the U.S. Senate Finance Committee. BBB Wise Giving Alliance's president and CEO, Art Taylor, provided testimony. Taylor said that as a charity monitoring organization the Alliance shares with government agencies the objective of fostering ethical conduct. But he emphasized that the Alliance encourages charities to abide by good practices that go beyond what the government can regulate "Our newest challenge" he noted, "is to meet donors' needs in the face of a rapidly expanding number of charitable organizations."

In the pursuit of its objective to expand the volume of its evaluative reports on national charities, the Alliance unveiled a ground-breaking new tool, the Online Charity Reporting and Evaluation System. The new system performs three core functions: (1) streamlines the information collected from charities by using a specially designed online form, (2) makes an initial analysis of the charity's responses to specific questions to determine if the charity meets or does not meet the comprehensive Standards for Charity Accountability, and (3) automatically generates a draft report on the subject charity that is reviewed by Alliance staff and forwarded to the subject charity prior to distribution.

Rather than submitting hundreds of pages of paper documents as was done for some of the Alliance's national charity evaluations, a charity will access a password-protected online form and complete a series of interactive questions. Alliance staff will review information reported online against three basic documents (audited financial statements, IRS Form 990, and the organization's annual report). The Alliance will encourage participating charities to attach this information electronically to the charity's completed online form. This online system is also being made available to local Better Business Bureaus.

During 2004, the Alliance completed its first full year of the National Charity Seal program, which had been launched the previous fall. In this program, national charities that the Alliance has determined meet the revised Standards for Charity Accountability may, if they wish, apply for a charity seal to display in their literature and online. Charities choosing to have the seal sign a license agreement and pay a fee based on their total contribution income in the last year. The Alliance was pleased to offer its 50th national charity seal during 2004 and continues to expand seal participation to help bring greater public attention both to the existence of the standards and to the Alliance as a source of information about giving.

The Give.Org website continued to experience a high volume of public contact. During 2004, charity reports on Give.Org were accessed more than 2.3 million times. The Alliance's website also had an unusually large volume of hits after the December 26th tsunami tragedy when the public sought information about charities involved with relief efforts. This increased activity continued in early 2005.

BBB Wise Giving Alliance - Roster of Board of Directors

2004 IRS Form 990 (Please note that this file is in a PDF format which requires your system to have Adobe Acrobat Reader. Because of its large size (26 pages) it may take a while to open. If you need to download the free Adobe Acrobat Reader program please click here.)