How To Rate Charities

By: John Lester
05/08/2011 07:45 AM ET

How To Rate Charities – Here are some important ways on how to rate charities. Always pay attention to charities on how they rate before you donate. Most organizations use donations for people that need help.

Once you’ve decided on which organization to support with your hard earned money, you should go to the website, charitynavigator.org. This website keeps track of tons of information on different organizations and can tell you which charities are best at getting your donation to people in need. When you get to the website, enter the name of your charity into the search bar at the top of the screen.

If you want the quickest review of your charity organization, look at the Overall Rating field on the page. Charity organizations that receive four stars or more are very efficient and definitely worth donating to. Perhaps, the second most important part of the charity ratings are the charts titled Expense Breakdown.

On these pie charts, you want to see the program expenses take up a far larger amount of the circle than administrative expenses or fundraising expenses. If this is the case, it signals a good charity rating. It means that the charity organization is giving most of your money to the people that it claims to be helping.

But what if the charity organization that you had hoped to donate to doesn’t turn out to rank high in the charity ratings? No problem. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, charity navigator always gives suggestions for other charity organizations that do similar types of work to the charity that you requested. Once you find other charity organizations that you would like to donate to, you can see how these organizations stack up to really know how to rate charities.