Monday, December 31, 2007

How to Choose a Charity

Speaking of navigation, for anyone thinking about donating to a charity, here is Charity Navigator, a tool to help find out which charitable organizations handle their finances well:

Tomorrow's your last chance to donate to charity in 2007, and if you don't know where to find the charities that are doing the best job for the cause you care about, check out independent evaluator Charity Navigator. Charity Navigator rates organizations based on their efficiency and capacity, and categorizes them by cause. If you're looking to be a smart donor this holiday season (and get a sweet tax write-off), Charity Navigator's got quite a few resources of interest, like the Top 10 Practices of Savvy Donors and 6 Questions To Ask Charities Before Donating. How did you decide what charity to support this year? Let us know in the comments.

Highest and Lowest-Rated Charities [Charity Navigator]

Unfortunately, Charity Navigator is unable to track many religious organizations because these organizations are exempt from filing the information Charity Navigators needs to track their financial health. For those looking to contribute to a Christian organization, you could try seeing if they are monitored by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability.

Tyler Cowen writes on choosing a charity:

This site offers many interesting tips. Here are their recommendations for how to save lives. Their first pick, Population Services International, distributes condoms and insecticide-soaked bednets. Here is a New York Times article about their operation.

See Dr. Cowen's other posts on charity here.

Kiva.org also looks like a good place to donate money. Kiva is a microfinance organization that links donors with small entrepreneurs (typically in the third world) around the world. A friend of mine gave me a $50 gift certificate to donate to an entrepreneur of my choice about a month ago. I need to get online and figure out who to donate it to.

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