I ultimately want to figure out how much it costs (in $) to save a
life. I understand that there's no exact answer to this question, but
I believe I can get a pretty close answer by getting the financial
data of any given charitable development program and data about how
many people it helped and how much it helped those people. Get me this
data about any given (or a few given)charitable development programs.

Hi rbagel-ga,

There appears to be one central source for data regarding
not-for-profit organizations in the United States:

http://www.guidestar.org/

This website provides FREE access to a database of over 850,000
IRS-recognized NFP organizations. Users are able to run searches on
the basis of any combination of the following criteria:

Nonprofit Name  
Keyword(s)    
City    
State 
Zip   
Category 
Nonprofit Type  
Income Range 
EIN    
NTEE Code
 
In your case, the most important field would be the Category (may I
suggest Health or International Development and Relief Services) and
perhaps income range (in order to obtain a statistically significant
range of values).

Most of the results, at least from the searches that I ran, had full
financial data available. This included key figures on annual income
statments and balance sheet.

Here is a description of the source of all this information from the
site:

"Where do you get your data? 
Financial information comes from: the IRS Business Master File of
501(c) nonprofits that may accept tax-deductible contributions; IRS
Form 990 or 990-EZ, which are financial returns filed by nonprofits
with more than $25,000 annual revenue; and the GuideStar Basic
Financial Statement, a form for nonprofits that do not file with the
IRS. Other information such as an organization's programs,
accomplishments, and goals are obtained directly from the organization
or from the organization's Form 990 or 990-EZ.
GuideStar goes to great lengths to ensure the quality and accuracy of
its database. GuideStar captures data from literally hundreds of
thousands of forms, with more than 100 million key-entered values each
year. The objective of GuideStar's data capture program is to capture
values exactly as they are input by the organization or paid preparer
for each Form 990 or Form 990-EZ. To that end, every numerical value
displayed on the GuideStar site is entered twice and any disparity
between entered values is reconciled. GuideStar Quality Assurance
staff monitors the accuracy of “double-keyed” data regularly. The
numerical fields in the GuideStar database are captured accurately at
the 99.9 percent level.

Further, GuideStar finds that charities themselves infrequently make
errors on the major financial sections of their Forms 990. GuideStar's
Quality Assurance staff has found organization-entry errors in 0.2
percent of fields entered. In 30 percent of the cases, such errors
result from the preparer's failure to transfer a value, which had been
established elsewhere on the document, into a required field (leaving
the field blank) and do not reflect erroneous data or suggest any
intention to misinform."

As far as the amount that any given organization has helped people,
you can usually find this kind of information on the organization's
website or through other contact information listed on GuideStar.

Search strategy:
"financial data" "charitable organizations"

Thanks for using Google Answers!

answerguru-ga

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Request for Answer Clarification by rbagel-ga on 07 Sep 2002 12:16 PDT

Can you just get me financial data for one specific program and the
benefits of theat pgrm?

---

Clarification of Answer by answerguru-ga on 07 Sep 2002 14:20 PDT

Hi again,

OK I'm using the data from the Transplant Resource Center of Maryland,
which has saved 387 lives in the year according to this article:

://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:nikhCAUvRX4C:www.mdtransplant.org/lives.htm+%22lives+saved%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

From the GuideStar search, the following financial info was obtained:
Assets:  $4,308,426  
Income:  $18,730,336  

http://www.guidestar.org/search/report/gs_report.jsp?npoId=644929&context=eNpVks9rE0EUx1%2B2VNPYxjYtgqLSHvS4exFRBBWs1dhEAsGDIJTJ7svuxM3O%2BOZtu%2B2h0IsevCp49OCxeBb8Bzz6J4h6Fbx51JlNYtKF%2FTFvvu%2FN533fHv%2BCeUMQhGroyyL1SYZ%2BnMsIDQvye8qPMcu08h%2BYLgoKk3sqYyz42cfG4Ze%2F5ocH9RacCgVxM2JotAZiVwSpyOKgyySz%2BFYLqiFJRpKC4dxoP2eZBh1SGoklGqupRSpTdH8oZPoCDqHSgnmcWSz0kcOkKw%2BQYXXmjKZliZFsgcVUGG6rSPYlWpDlmYM2
aNVnNYixic0KVnVwpg9RdF4XSPUirgjOBlH6oQmT9l0TuQtGDRGqqw5SVxyRrFttZlFWLjgnK1m8uFQ0P40b5EVi7QtbB9oSlWhtTV%2BzYH6DtSfOnKz8fVAX7%2F9zitJI%2BwLB%2BKyvIJgdZryUJiERS%2FF1c9nr2w8%2BvlpDrwtqKVKRFsiZEVNWODENpKoNCr0nbvgru29qn2ivT2202drEIPX3mSoPsd9Z4phuMAkMqOtz7xuC6icQlwP0TpOltyhr5QcbhD%2BeBCN7%2B8%2F%2FDl6dcNyN2F%2BV6Q5Wt7lqe5xPuwhvTx%2Be%2BnMm2%2BvPYBCW4rLtlh92pQbWDI4qmw%2F5fNzTlLi%2Fr56bW2jYFgJTPkjBtL57Q%2B
1gz1SXA0RUs%2FCYxeO%2BNZlvLSyCVnBMPFk4lBbHZGX075X1j5B6k1BeM%3D

So from this we can calculate a couple of ratios:

ROI = (Assets/Lives Saved) = ($4,308,426 / 387) = $11,132.88 worth of
assets required on average to save each life.

Cost of Life = (Income / Lives Saved) = ($18,730,336 / 387) =
$48,398.80

Of course each NFP organization will not have the same type of
information available and this is just one of many possible types of
calculations.

The procedure I used was simply to find publications by NFPs stating
how many lives have been saved as a result of their activities, and
then creating ratios from the data obtained using GuideStar.

Thanks for using Google Answers :)

answerguru-ga

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Request for Answer Clarification by rbagel-ga on 31 Oct 2002 07:51 PST

I was refering to overseas aid and development programs, not domestic
programs, and especially not something as non-monetary as transplants.

---

Clarification of Answer by answerguru-ga on 31 Oct 2002 08:42 PST

Hi again rbagel-ga,

Many of the organizations listed under GuideStar operate overseas so
you can use the same method as was previously outlined to derive a
monetary figure. Since you never mentioned anything about overseas in
your question it seems like the scope of the question is expanding.
You should actually post another question focusing on overseas
programs.

answerguru-ga

He did answer the ? of how much it costs to save a life. But I was
looking for how much it costs for an overseas development or relief
organization to save a life. His data was weak, using the costs of
recruiting limb donors or something.