The Chronicle of Philanthropy publishes an annual list of the biggest U.S. donors called The Philathropy 50. Think you're a generous donor? To earn even the bottom placement on the list your donations in 2014 would have needed to exceed $43 million. As might be expected, the top place went to Bill and Melinda Gates, who were responsible for $1.9 billion of charitable donations.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has proposed changes to how charities must report their net assets and is accepting public comment until August 20, 2015. The changes are intended to improve the usefulness of financial statements for both internal and external stakeholders while reducing the complexities and costs shouldered by charities required to produce financial data about their operations.

I was happy to work with Good Morning America this past December to assist them with screening NewFlex Hoops, aka NewFlex Youth Programs, a New York based charity that focuses on mentoring youth through basketball and other sports programs. This is a small charity primarily run by volunteers that provides important youth programs in an underserved community. 

Much of the success of fundraising for a disaster depends on how the narrative of the disaster is crafted by the governments and charities responding to it, and how the story unfolds in the media. If it's personal-- if the story is told in a way that provides a clear beginning point for the crisis and also allows us to imagine ourselves being in the desperate situation at hand--our empathy gene is activated. If on the other hand the narrative becomes too impersonal--too many statistics; too focused on intellectual public policy discussions; too generalized and focused on the otherness of far off problems in far away places--the story falls flat. We don't feel involved. And when we don't feel involved we don't give.

To me this seems like a classic case of losing the plot. Most foundations are not funding charities for the sake of sustaining the charities as ends unto themselves. No charity "deserves" to exist if it is highly ineffective simply because the people who work there are passionate about a cause. Most grantmaking foundations want to fund charitable causes for the sake of the cause through whatever charity can forward that cause most effectively, not fund charities for the sake of the charities. Punishing charities that prove themselves to be highly efficient and effective by pulling their funding amounts to promoting mediocrity in the best case, and failure in the worst case. It communicates the message, "We will reward you with more funding if you do a bad job because we like to feel needed, and punish you and the beneficiaries of your work if you do a good job." This is absurd.