Where money for endangered species actually goes

No ranking of wildlife charities can tell you what a donation will do, because the ratings are not measuring that. Charity Navigator and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance assess how an organisation is governed, what it discloses and how it spends — the conditions under which money is likely to be handled well. Neither measures whether a species recovered. What decides the fate of a particular gift is structural: who actually receives it, how many organisations it passes through before it reaches anyone in the field, and whether it arrives tied to a named project or free for the recipient to spend.

What a rating measures

Charity Navigator scores four beacons — accountability and finance, impact and measurement, leadership and planning, culture and compensation — and renders the result as stars. The BBB Wise Giving Alliance publishes pass-or-fail standards instead; two of them concern money, asking a charity to spend at least 65% of total expenses on programme activities and no more than 35% of related contributions on fundraising.

Both are floors, and useful as floors. Neither is an outcome. An organisation can clear every standard and still fund work that changes nothing for a species, and the two-person outfit counting nests on one island is likely to be rated by nobody at all — Charity Navigator says itself that there are many worthy organisations it does not evaluate.

The people who publish the ratios said not to lean on them

On 17 June 2013 the chief executives of Charity Navigator, GuideStar and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance published an open letter to American donors denouncing the overhead ratio as the sole measure of a charity's performance. Overhead, they wrote, covers training, planning, evaluation and internal systems as well as the fundraising that pays for programmes, and a fixation on it starves an organisation of the freedom to do its work. Their summary:

The people and communities served by charities don't need low overhead, they need high performance.

The one stretch of the chain anyone has audited

Multilateral funds publish enough about themselves to be audited from outside, and one such audit is worth a donor's hour. From 2023 to 2025 the International Institute for Environment and Development examined how much of the Global Environment Facility's biodiversity finance reaches Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Its briefing, issued in May 2025, estimated that 24% of GEF-6 funding and 30% of GEF-7 funding was targeted at those groups at the design stage — and then said plainly that many projects named them as indirect beneficiaries rather than as recipients, so the figures do not describe money that arrived. Among the organisations the researchers interviewed, one in Malawi reported receiving 0.3% of its project's total. The facility's money moves through eighteen implementing agencies, all of them development banks, UN agencies or international NGOs, and no indicator in the reporting framework obliges any of them to report how much reached a local partner.

That is multilateral public finance with a paper trail, not a donation page, and the two should not be assumed to behave alike. It is worth reading because it shows what the question looks like when somebody actually asks it, and how much of the answer turns out not to be recorded anywhere.

Restricted and unrestricted

A restricted gift is spent on the thing you named. An unrestricted one is spent on whatever the recipient judges most useful, which may be a vehicle, a salary, an accountant, or the six months of work it takes to write the next proposal. Donors tend to prefer the first, because it feels like control.

The Center for Effective Philanthropy's Breaking the Mold, published in February 2025 after three years following recipients of MacKenzie Scott's large unrestricted gifts, surveyed 813 nonprofit leaders and 243 foundation leaders. Nearly 90% of recipients said the grant had strengthened their long-term financial sustainability and 93% said it had strengthened their ability to achieve their mission. Foundation leaders were more sceptical than recipients: 60% named funding cliffs as the greatest drawback of giving that way, while 7% of recipients expected significant difficulty covering ongoing costs.

Those were very large gifts to American nonprofits across every field, not conservation grants, and nothing in the study says a small donation behaves the same way. What it establishes is that the restriction is not a neutral administrative detail. It is part of what you are giving.

Questions that outrank a star score

• Who receives the money — the organisation doing the work, or one that regrants it to somebody else?
• Is the gift restricted, and was that your decision or the form's?
• Is it recurring? IIED's recommendation to the Global Environment Facility was for funding that is long-term, patient, predictable and flexible, which is a fair description of what field organisations are usually short of.
• What does the organisation publish afterwards, and does it name what did not work?

This publication ranks nothing and takes no commission from anyone named here. Every record in the archive lists the sources it stands on with the date each was read — the golden lion tamarin's names the organisations whose reports its account is drawn from. That is the same thing worth asking of a charity: not a score, but what it is willing to publish about what it did.