Charity Navigator, America's premier independent charity evaluator, works to advance a more efficient and responsive philanthropic marketplace by evaluating the financial health of America's largest charities.  Charity Navigator works to guide intelligent giving. Their goal is to help people give to charity with confidence. At the same time, they aim to help charities by shining lights on truly effective organizations. In doing so, they believe they can help ensure that charitable giving keeps pace with the growing need for charitable programs.

Their approach to rating charities is driven by those two objectives: helping givers and celebrating the work of charities.  They rate charities by evaluating two broad areas of financial health, their organizational efficiency and their organizational capacity. They use a set of financial ratios or performance categories to rate each of these two areas, and they issue an overall rating that combines the charity's performance in both areas. Their ratings show givers how efficiently they believe a charity will use their support today, and to what extent the charities are growing their programs and services over time. They provide these ratings so that givers can make intelligent giving decisions, and so that the philanthropic community can more effectively monitor itself.