Americans give a large amount of money to charity every year, but often do not have enough information to make informed choices. We call on the Obama administration to:
1. Support research into what information about charities donors find most relevant;
2. Establish regulatory requirements that public charities report a certain minimum amount of financial and program-related information and send that information to donors along with marketing materials;
3. Strengthen accounting and disclosure standards so that information on program success and administrative overhead is directly comparable across organizations;
4. Develop a framework for governance, modeled on public corporations, in which donors directly elect Directors to non-profit boards and approve major organizational changes.