Within the past month, New Jersey’s Division of Consumer Affairs unveiled a new iPhone app that is sure to create a lot of waves in the charitable donation industry. The app, called “Charity Lookup,” allows you to quickly investigate charities before donating to them. The app will be updated weekly with information from the New Jersey Division’s database and will provide information on an organization’s background, expenses and revenues. The point behind this app? To allow people to really know who they are shelling out their money to. However, the decision on what organization to donate to is not as cut-and-dry as this app makes it out to be.

According to our very own experts in the charitable donation industry here at Evergreen Partners, while anything that encourages individuals to give to a cause is important, the app simply does not provide enough information to help donors get a good sense of what their money is supporting.

Don’t just trust what an app says – Donors who want to be educated about a non-profit’s spending should look at the organization’s website to review its annual report. More importantly, however, get involved.  Just providing numbers alone can be unclear and unhelpful – a piece of technology that gives someone numbers does not properly represent the complexity of non-profit services. The types of services an organization provides and the details in how it spends its money can be much more important than the amount of money that it spends. In some cases money spent on capital might be just as important as the money spent on programming.

If you are going to investigate a charity you might as well do a full investigation and read about them instead of reading a very brief summary from a piece of technology. While convenient, “Charity Lookup” does not provide the whole picture.

In early May, a reporter from the Sturgis Journal (Sturgis, Michigan) took to the paper’s blog to vent his feelings on the areas that college students choose to focus on these days. In his writing, Jef Rietsma picked Evergreen’s Karen Kessler as someone who has been described as an “expert in reputation management” and to express his astonishment that that is a field that people can study in school.

However, going only on information provided from this USA Today article, a number of assumptions were made without the correct information.

Well, after reaching out to Mr. Rietsma, Karen provided some clarification to his misinformation. Thankfully Mr. Rietsma recognized his mistake and wrote a terrific acknowledgment on his blog that he may have been a bit misinformed on Karen’s background and accomplishments.

The lesson we can all learn from this: When journalists makes assumptions based on insufficient facts and reporting, it can hurt a person’s reputation. So, armed with the facts, a focused and direct response can trump reputation slights!