December 29, 2004

Tsunami Relief: Charity Efficiency and Transparency Ratings It seems everyone wants to help with victims of the recent tsunami. But does your assistance get where it needs to? I know a lot of charitable organizations have ridiculous "overhead," meaning a lot of your money doesn't help as much as it should...and of course, there are shady organizations. With that in mind, someone else decided to rate the various charities, noting problematic or troublesome issues, as well as links to pretty reputable sites that tell you how you best can help. link. Check it out, if interested. Help add to the list of organizations too, to help others. If you want to help but aren't interested in personally researching things, my recommendation would be to use the Red Cross, based on experience with them.
posted by hunterdane 19 years ago
  • from the other red cross FPP, wonder how THIS guy's site, pleasegivenow.com, would rate. heh. come on! help him raise $3 million and he PROMISES he'll give it to the red cross/red crescent! really!
  • You know, I was looking for a ratings site like this, but for U.S. domestic charities... I know they have to provide a disclosure but I could not find ANY site that carried the info. Last thing I want to do is be paying a $120,000 director's salary.
  • BBB Wise Giving Alliance The BBB Wise Giving Alliance collects and distributes information on hundreds of nonprofit organizations that solicit nationally or have national or international program services. It routinely asks such organizations for information about their programs, governance, fund raising practices, and finances when the charities have been the subject of inquiries. The BBB Wise Giving Alliance never recommends one charity over another, and selects charities for evaluation based on the volume of donor inquiries about individual organizations. These policies allow the Alliance to serve donors' information needs and also help donors to make their own decisions regarding charitable giving. Charity Navigator Charity Navigator works to guide intelligent giving. We help charitable givers make intelligent giving decisions by providing information on over thirty-two hundred charities and by evaluating the financial health of each of these charities. We ensure our evaluations are widely used by making them easy to understand and freely available to the public. By guiding intelligent giving, we aim to advance a more efficient and responsive philanthropic marketplace, in which givers and the charities they support work in tandem to overcome our nation's most persistent challenges. Charity Navigator is a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization under the Internal Revenue Code and does not accept any contributions from any charities we evaluate.
  • The important thing is to contribute whatever you can. Please do it now.
  • I posted a link in the celbrity disaster thread before I saw this, so I'll duplicate it here. A list from the CBC, including the charity I donated to, CARE: admin costs are low there.
  • I posted this at MeFi too, but Direct Relief has what I think is the smallest margin of overhead at just 1%. They do a fantastic job of getting doctors and medicines to disaster sites in a hurry, I have worked with them myself and they are an amazing organization.
  • I prefer the Red Cross, having worked with them a bit in the past. I donated $1000 for the Tsunami Relief Fund and trust them to spend it on helping, more than I'd trust, say, that guy. lol
  • I might try the Direct Relief people, because I want to give something and it seems to be hard to track down overhead figures for the more well-known charities. It's a little disturbing seeing new charity groups that I've never heard of suddenly asking for tsunami relief donations on TV. Dodgy.