Fractured Atlas Gets 4-Star Rating from Charity Navigator

Charity Navigator has given Fractured Atlas a 4-star rating (out of 4 possible stars) in its first ever review of the organization.

I know some folks object to these kinds of charity-rating metrics, and I do understand that perspective, but I find them useful nonetheless. No, they don’t tell the whole story, but that’s true of any set of statistics anywhere. You have to dig a little deeper if you want to develop a meaningful understanding of an organization. But I can’t help but appreciate the trend towards asking non-profits to run more efficiently and to be smarter about money. To the extent that metrics and competitive rankings are part of that process, they are valuable.

So why did Fractured Atlas get such a great ranking from Charity Navigator? The ranking formula is totally transparent, so you can see for yourself. Mainly, we scored lots of points for spending such a small portion of our expenses on management and administration. The one area that hurt our score was our working capital ratio (although in our case I’d argue that’s not particularly relevant, since our business isn’t particularly capital intensive).

Keep in mind these numbers are from FY2006 (which ended in August 2006) so they’re more than a bit out of date. For example, our budget for FY2008 is roughly twice what’s listed there.