[bilbo0s]

I think the material point of HN User Yuliyp's comment is that the organization claiming to be providing us with "Charity Sense", for some reason is not providing us all of the data we need to make sense of charities. Even worse, it seems to be deliberately disingenuous in presenting the data it does give us.

At least provide explanations of why certain things are included or excluded from the numbers they're presenting. Why are hospitals and universities lumped in with the food bank in the first place for instance? When you remove them, the numbers and percentages radically change. Not only that, it doesn't feel like the average person sees a food bank and a university, or a hospital, (and certainly not a university hospital), as the same sort of "charity". When you start digging deeper into the numbers, it just looks like they were lumped in to make the less resourced charities like food banks look bad.

Maybe there was some other reason they had for using this amalgamation? But they should be forthcoming with what that reason was.

[Retric]

> Why are hospitals and universities lumped in with the food bank in the first place for instance?

Ask the IRS / congress, this isn’t some arbitrary grouping it’s what charity means in the US.

I do think it’s worth asking that question, but ask it of the people who can do something about it.

[bilbo0s]

The people claiming to be making sense of charities are the people who are supposed to be teasing that data out.

[Retric]

If you’re making sense of something you need to include everything in that category.

It’s perfectly reasonable to create different subdivisions / buckets based your own definitions or NTEE code etc, but all those sub categories combined must add up to the same thing as how charities are defined.

[bombcar]

> Why are hospitals and universities lumped in with the food bank in the first place for instance?

Because if you don't have shareholders and like to raise money that's not from VCs, it is convenient to have the donors get a tax deduction.

Otherwise you can run a business with little to no tax without being a non-profit.

[bilbo0s]

The question was not why did the IRS amalgamate those organizations.

The question was why did Charity Sense amalgamate those organizations.

What value is it adding if it does nothing other than report data we could get from the IRS in any case? Saying, "Hey man, we just re-post the data we get from the IRS." Is the same thing as saying, "We didn't really do any analysis."

[relaxing]

Because they’re pushing an agenda that they mean to profit from.

[mtweak]

Yes, non-profits is a superset of "charitable non-profits". The IRS puts all 501(c)(3) organizations under the same filing framework. Hospitals and universities are in there alongside food banks and shelters. Breaking them out by NTEE code gives a more granular picture is a great idea.

[Retric]

501(c)(3) is just one of 29 types of non profits defined by the IRS. Many non-profits aren’t charities and some of them can even distribute profits.

501(c)(7) IE non profit social club for example could be just about anything from knitting circle to a S&M sex club. Have that club buy property and then at some point in the future sell that property at a profit which is then distributed to those members.