The past two years have not been kind to charitable organizations. Scandals
involving charities and foundations have appeared with depressing regularity in
the nation’s newspapers, from the San Jose Mercury News to the Boston Globe, and
have involved even gilt-edged institutions like the United Way. McKinsey &
Co. published a report claiming the charitable sector wastes $100 billion a
year. The U.S. Senate launched an investigation of the world’s largest
environmental organization, the Nature Conservancy, and the U.S. House of
Representatives launched its first investigation in years into how foundations
spend their administrative budgets. (See “Charity in the Round,” on page
118.)  The steady stream of bad news has undermined public faith in the
nation’s 1.5 million charitable organizations. At the Brookings Institution
Center for Public Service, we have conducted six surveys of public confidence in
charitable organizations since 9/11. The results of our sixth and most recent
public opinion survey indicate that confidence in charitable organizations,
which fell sharply in the wake of the controversy surrounding disbursement of
the 9/11 relief funds, has yet to recover. As of October 2003, when we
interviewed our latest random sample of Americans by telephone, only 18 percent
of those surveyed indicated they had a great deal of confidence in charitable
organizations, while 34 percent said they had “not too much” or no confidence at
all, and 60 percent stated that they believe charitable organizations waste a
great deal or a fair amount of money. Trust increased with income, but decreased
with age.
Public confidence in charitable organizations is higher than
confidence in big business and the news media, but it is about on a par with
confidence in the Catholic church, public schools and the IRS. The survey
respondents also said they have much less confidence in charitable organizations
than they do in Congress, the president and the military. Confidence in
charitable organizations as a whole clearly affects a person’s willingness to
donate the discretionary dollar or hour of spare time. Unsurprisingly, Americans
with no confidence in charitable organizations were almost twice as likely as
those with a great deal of confidence to say that the leaders of charitable
organizations are paid too much and five times more likely to say charitable
organizations waste money. They were also much less likely to have donated time
or money over the past year. The question is whether charitable organizations
can actually do anything to reverse and shape public opinion.
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