Steps to take to check out a charity before making a donation to it!

You may be thinking of making a charitable donation, but with so many to choose from it can get a bit confusing. Sometimes choosing is easy: quite simply because the charitable cause has affected your life in some way already. Perhaps you were on the receiving end of the charities work, or perhaps someone you know was positively affected by the policies the charity mandated for. Whatever your situation, here I will attempt to provide some starter guidelines to help with your first foray into the world of charity giving. Think of it as a ‘things to look out for and steps to take to make sure your donation goes to the right people’. Step 1. Certify the Charity! Before making a donation it’s advisable to do a little background research first about the charity: Do they have a registered charity number (a good sign to officialdom)? A registered charity number will mean that the organization has had to go through a series of steps at a country level to secure its position and status as a charitable organization. However do remember that not all organizations that you would think are charities are in fact so. As a result they may not have a registered charity number. For example UNHCR Canada (The country office for UN Refugee Agency) is not issued with a registered charity number but do work that most people would consider charity in nature. Checking on the registered charity status is a good indicator to authenticity should you be unsure as to whether to donate or not. How effective are the charities in the work they do? It’s not enough just to say you are a charity, you also have to provide it in actual facts! First off you should see if there are any financial reports that can be accessed. Why? Not just to see how much money the charity collects each year but its own administrative costs of disbursing those funds through the various chapters and offices? The crucial factor that you need to note is the administrative cost of disbursing funds. As a general rule you want to be giving to charities that are able to set their administrative costs to less than 16% of collected donations. That means that if a charity were to raise $1million in a year that no more than $160,000 of that amount would be used in salaries and other operational costs. This is an important fact to consider. Give to charities that are effective at managing themselves as well as the programmes they advertise for. Step 2. Set realistic donation amounts Charity begins at home, but only give what you can afford to. There is no point setting up monthly donations if you find that after a few months that you cannot keep up the payments and need to change them. This will cost you money in time to change, and also the charity the money in administration costs to manage (money that could be spent elsewhere if you had planned more carefully from the outset!). Tip 1. Avoid Telemarketing Be wary of people who ask you to contribute money over the phone, particularly if they are asking for credit card details. Not because those charities that use this method are inherently bad (although some of the sales tactics can be quite overpowering) but rather that it does not allow you to go through steps one and two described here. Two steps which should, if done well, bring you closer to the work of the charity and get you more committed to the organization. Tip 2. Give Money Safely Unless you are giving money into a donation box in the street (but you should always ask to see an ID of the person collecting the money and get a receipt) don’t give cash in person or your credit card number over the phone. Most charities will either have a Just Giving page or allow donations by bank transfer or PayPal. You will find that when you decide to make a donation charities are very good at providing the full range of options to make the donation happen. In cases where you are not overly familiar with the charity then use a payment mechanism that allows for some kind of verifiable tracking (such as a bank transfer) or that has some form of customer payment protection included (many credit cards have features such as this which may cost a small annual fee to activate but with the move more and more towards online payment systems, it makes sense to use). The aim of this article is not to scare but just to provide you with a broader view of charitable giving, and some of the precautionary steps that are common sense to take if you are going to be giving money and support to a charity.