[4] It provides insights into a nonprofit's financial stability, adherence to best practices for both accountability and transparency, and results reporting.

[7] Charity Navigator was launched in the spring of 2001 by John P. (Pat) Dugan, a pharmaceutical executive and philanthropist.

[11] In 2011, Kiplinger's Personal Finance selected Charity Navigator as a Money Management Innovation for "helping millions of people become philanthropists", and it was on Time magazine's top 50 websites of 2006 list.

This method was criticized in a 2005 article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review for (at the time) taking into account only a single year's IRS Form 990.

[20] Form 990 categorizes a charity's expenditures into three broad categories that are open to accounting manipulation.

[21] In December 2008, President and CEO Ken Berger announced on his blog that the organization intended to expand its rating system to include measures of the outcomes of the work of charities it evaluated.

[27] In January 2013, Charity Navigator announced another expansion to its rating methodology, "Results Reporting: The Third Dimension of Intelligent Giving".

[28] In July 2020, Charity Navigator announced an additional nonprofit rating system, Encompass.