Know Before You Donate to Charitable Organizations

How many of us know where your donation to charity is going? Most of the cases we don't care to know the afterwards of our donation to charity. You have every right to know about the organization to which you are donating your valuable money. You should have complete knowledge about the organization and the work they do before you donate something to them. Now-a-days the charity fraud is one the distinguishable fraud activity taking place all over the world. There is one checklist in FTC Charity Fraud site which we all should follow before we make our next donation to any charitable organization. Especially during our festive season we receive numerous phone calls or mails for various charitable organizations. The organization like the American Red-Cross, the Salvation Army and the American Cancer Society are well known to us, but there are several charitable organizations for which we never heard their name off. This is your responsibility to keep yourself out from the trap of those fraud organizations. What you can readily do outside of following that checklist is go to Charity Navigator site and look for that charitable organization.

Charity Navigator is a site who evaluates the charitable organization based on certain criteria and gives a rating to display the organization's trustworthiness. From their recommendation you can get idea about that charitable organization. They only evaluate the organizations who has received the tax-exempt status under 501(C)(3) of Internal Revenue Service (IRS). You might have already known that under 501(C) all your donation to these types of charitable organization can be considered as tax-exempt. The organization has to go through at least four years with IRS tax-exempt status under 501(C) section. The organization can have their activity spread across the globe, but the organization physically needs to be situated in US.

Charity Navigator uses several defined factors to evaluate the efficiency of the organization, namely Program expense, Administrative Expense, Fundraising Expense, Fundraising efficiency. There are several institutions that spend more money for their administrative purpose or for the fund raising campaign; by this rating system, definitely, they are going to score less rating than others who has very less administrative expense. Everyone wants the maximum utilization of their donation. We also need to look at the capacity of the organization in terms of how capable they are in utilizing the money they raised in past years. Few organization are facing problem due to lack of new initiatives and that leading them to have unutilized funds for long time. You will not want to spend for those organizations who don't work promptly.

If you browse through this site you will able to know lots of tips and facts about charitable organization and what are the facts you should consider before you donate to charitable organizations. Simply search the name of the organization for which you want to know about. It will provide you with current rating and historical data. For current data you will be able to find out about organizational efficiency and organizational capacity. Under organizational efficiency it will provide complete data for all other sub categories, e.g. program expense, administrative expense etc. and under organizational capacity it will provide revenue growth, program expense growth etc. This all data will help you to realize the functionality and performance of that organization. You also able to know about the top 10 best charitable organizations currently and who are doing bad at their level of operation. All information is very much helpful to get information about the charitable organizations surrounding you.

One thing we need to remember that this site only deals with apparently large and noticeable charity. We often find numerous charitable organizations that are not grown enough to come under this consideration, but they are also doing a great job. If you don't find an organization not listed in this site that doesn't mean the organization is not worth enough to donate your money. If an organization is listed in this site with low rating that surely signifies that the organization is not doing good enough to get further donation from you. So be careful before you make your decision. This is one tool which can help you with information, decision is your own.