The Southern Heritage Air Foundation is one of the country’s top nonprofit organizations according to Great Nonprofits, a national organization that shares information and reviews about nonprofit organizations.

“This is our fifth year to get top nonprofit and we’re super excited about it,” Southern Heritage Air Foundation President Patty Mekus said. “To get it five years in a row is super cool.”

Mekus said Great Nonprofits is a platform that gathers reviews from people and Internal Revenue reports from nonprofit organizations and ranks them.

“It kind of keeps you an honest nonprofit,” she said. “This is a friendly kind of platform. It’s a great feeling because it keeps in check. It humbles us, but then it lets us know what our guests and donors think about us.

“It’s exciting, too, because it means we’re doing the things we’re supposed to be doing.”

While there are many sources people use to learn about the foundation and the Southern Heritage Air Museum, Mekus said, “When somebody’s looking to donate to us they’re going to want to see that less than 10 percent of our expenditures are administrative; the rest goes to all the programs.

“It gives somebody a little bit of comfort to know when you’re giving to an organization the money’s going to programs,” she said.

Mekus said the foundation has been listed as a nonprofit organization since 2013. She said Great Nonprofits contacted foundation officials in 2015.

“They saw what we were doing and said, ‘You might want to sign up and join us and we can legitimize you even more,’” she said. 

According to its website, Great Nonprofits “allows people to find, review, and share information about great — and perhaps not yet great — nonprofits.”

The site allows donors, volunteers and clients to share their personal experiences with and reviews of charitable organizations, providing crowd-sourced information about the reputability of these organizations.