The problem is there is no guarantee the warehouse worker at a food bank is doing anything of value. So we can’t assume such things are productive without direct evidence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.