About our Charity Navigator Rating

We believe Charity Navigator is performing a valuable service to donors by increasing accountability among nonprofit organizations, we regret that their rating system does not provide truly comparable results when applied across ministries with fundamentally different operating models. The question of comparability is one reason why the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA) does not produce ratings or rankings of nonprofits. It is for this reason that we strongly disagree with the rating Charity Navigator has assigned to Prison Fellowship, and we recently contacted them regarding this concern.

Charity Navigator does not make a distinction between ministries that receive millions of dollars of gifts-in-kind (e.g., food, clothing, and medicine) and others, like Prison Fellowship, that rely solely on cash giving by many individual supporters. This creates a significant inequity in comparing functional expense and fundraising efficiency ratios among such dissimilar organizations. Also, our ministry relies on thousands of volunteers who enter prison each month to reach prisoners for Christ or who visit the families of inmates; these volunteers greatly multiply our ministry’s impact, but under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) the value of their service is not included in our financial statements. Prison Fellowship and other ministries that rely on such volunteers should not be compared “apples to apples” with regard to program expense ratios with organizations that do not use volunteers. A more appropriate analysis would be a review of each organization’s results.

An important element of the Charity Navigator star rating is the Organizational Capacity rating, which measures trends in revenue, program expenses, and working capital ratio. Like a number of other organizations, we have seen declines in revenue during the past two years as the recession has hit our supporters. In response, we have carefully adjusted expenditures to help prevent spending more than we could afford. But our current Organizational Capacity rating is also significantly impacted by the fact that, unlike many other organizations included in the average ratios compiled by Charity Navigator, our office facilities and certain other assets are held by a separate organization (Prison Fellowship Ministries Foundation) and are therefore not included in the working capital ratio calculated by Charity Navigator. Had those assets been included, our ranking would have been higher last year.

While we support and applaud Charity Navigator’s work, we believe there are flaws in their methodology and those shortcomings make fair, comparative ratings critically elusive.

The Real Impact of Prison Fellowship

We believe that Charity Navigator should take into account the many ways in which our ministry is making a real, tangible impact. Here are several examples for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2010:

• Active in 1,329 prisons across the U.S.
• 10,938 certified volunteers shared the Gospel with several thousand of inmates
• Participated in 32 special prison evangelistic events attended by 5,686 inmates
• Partnered with 134 churches and 81 non-church organizations to mentor inmates and recently released individuals
• Served 363,845 children of 202,669 incarcerated parents through Angel Tree
• Partnered with 7,763 churches and other organizations to run Angel Tree
• Helped send 5,003 kids to Christian summer camps
• Answered 10,684 letters from inmates
• Reached 245,000 supporters monthly through Jubilee newsletter
• 1,783 participants in 8 Out4Life reentry conferences conducted in partnership with the Department of Corrections
• Provided expert testimony in 11 legislative hearings and national conferences
• Distributed the Justice eReport to 25,000 subscribers
• Reached 8 million listeners weekly through “BreakPoint” and “The Point” radio commentaries

We wish there were a truly excellent system for assigning ratings to the outcomes of ministries, but there isn’t one yet. In the meantime, we think these are the most important measures of the work being done by Prison Fellowship. Regardless of our rating by Charity Navigator, we know that this ministry is committed every day, by God’s grace, to responsibly using the resources He provides through faithful supporters like you.