Charities better stop actin’ shady

You might have heard about Kanye West asking for investors yesterday for unspecified “dope ideas.” You might also remember that the Kanye West Foundation earned $500,000 in revenue and gave none of it to charity. Cynic journalists that we are, we know companies can be shady, but so can charities. (That subject line is a Kanye lyric… I think.)

Charities file documents called 990s, that let you know how much money they earned, where they dealt it out, and some other stuff. IRE has a good guide to reading the document. I recently discovered the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, which serves up entire 990 documents as well as super convenient breakdowns:

One warning: this was all going along fine until I decided to test one last nonprofit and the Explorer’s data was off – it gave assets as $300,000 rather than $3 million. That’s a big difference 😒 So maybe check out the PDF if you’re using the summary for a story. Plus there’s always GuideStar and Charity Navigator.

I’m gonna close this week with a call to action: we haven’t had a guest post on here in a while, and I know you all are using cool tools the rest of us don’t know about. Email or tweet at me if you’d like to share!