What charity should you choose?

According to Give.org "In a detailed donor expectations survey of two thousand Americans commissioned by the Alliance in 2001, 70% of adult Americans said it is difficult to tell whether a charity soliciting for contributions is legitimate." With more than 20 000 charities available online (or, according to another site, 1.7 million nonprofits ), how do you choose which one you should give to? And how do you evaluate the ones you know about or find?

Ideally, as I argued in my last post, I would want to be able to see these ranked in terms of indicators capturing both impact and effectiveness. We're not quite there yet, and so the question is what you do instead. How do you find an organization, and how do you evaluate it?

Some of the more common strategies I think people are using to do both are:

1. Give "reactively," i.e. give in response to fundraisers who contact you or specific ads or TV spots, and judge it using "gut feeling" based on the information, images etc. provided
   
2. Give to a large, well-known institution (Red Cross, UNICEF, Save the Children, etc.). After all, these are big, professional organizations that are probably under a lot of scrutiny due to their size and visibility, which might be taken to mean that evaluating them on your own is unneccessary.
   
3. Follow a recommendation or connection from somebody famous (see the celebrity-associated charities here or one of the celebrity-backed causes at SixDegrees.org ) - and assume that this cause is worthy because the celebrity would not risk his or her image or credibility by being associated with an illegitimate operation.
   
4. Give to a cause (malaria, child health, AIDS, disaster relief etc.) - and use size, gut feeling, a quick google-search etc. to evaluate it

It turns out that there are different types of sites available to help people in this area as well. Some of the ones I've dug up (without doing an extensive analysis to assess their credibility or anything) are:

• Charity Navigator provides ratings and info on charities ("5 300 of America's largest charities"), with hassle-free access to various financial indicators (financing costs as share of total revenues, administration costs compared to total budget etc.) and the ratings based on scores relative to each others. They also provide various top 10 lists on their front page allowing you to see the "most frequently reviewed" organizations, "inefficient fundraiser", "highly paid CEOs at low rated charities" etc.
• Network For Good provides a way of finding charities for specific causes (through Guidestar )and donating through a central payment system to any one of these. The service was started by large companies such as AOL and Yahoo, and also provides "regular giving" options to easily set up automatic giving to a variety of charities, and collecting your financial info over the year (to simplify tax deductions). Guidestar provides some simple financial and "mission" related information, but they suggest using Charity Navigator to gain a more analytical overview
• Give.org  provides a list of roughly 500 charities (to be expanded) and evaluates them in terms of whether they fulfill a set of standards for charity accountability
• Justgive.org provides a list of category-sorted charities satisfying certain requirements. Take a look at the JustGive guide which contains 1 000 charities sorted into categories (such as community, crime prevention or health & disease) and subcategories (such as specific diseases within health). These charities have been evaluated and judged to pass a set of criteria, mostly financial, but also some that piggyback on (presumably more extensive) research of large funds ("Charities who have received funding from the top 100 foundations generally have to go through extensive reviews of their programs and financials. We examine the grant recipients based on this process"). Finally, they claim to rely on expert testimony and reviews. In addition, they have various other services (such as charity gift-certificates, charity wish lists and wedding registries) and set up recurring donations. Their stated mission is "creating tools and services to make charitable giving part of our everyday lives [...] a nonprofit organization whose mission is to increase charitable giving by connecting people with the charities and causes they care most about."
  

The basic lack of these sites seems (to me) that they lack tools to help people compare and prioritize between causes. To be able to do this, you need to be presented with information on both how serious and prevalent a problem is, and how expensive, difficult and risky current approaches to reducing or solving the problem are. In other words: Is there a big problem? And is there anything we can do?

The only page I have found that makes a serious attempt to address the question of impact and cost-effectiveness (what can we do - and what would it achieve?) is Givewell.net. It will be very interesting to follow this webpage going forward. It is a relatively recent page, and seems on a first look very text-heavy and (I would guess) difficult to navigate and use to draw out easily actionable information. Also - the span and number of organizations is still relatively narrow and small.

Anyone know of any other sites or services along these lines? Please let me know by email or comment...