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Charitable Foundations
Now that it is the Christmas season, it is natural to think about giving to the less fortunate. The question is, who should you give to? Do you just start handing out money to homeless people on the street? Do you give to a local nonprofit charity? Should you give them your time, your money, or both?
It probably won't surprise you that not all charitable foundations are the same, but it may surprise you how much they differ. A gift to one charity organization may be used almost entirely to help the less fortunate, whereas a gift another one will do very little good. It all comes down to how the charitable foundation is set up. Some nonprofit organizations simply emphasize the work that are dedicated to. Other ones focus more on fund raising. Charity fund raising organizations have a tremendous amount of overhead. Out of every dollar that you give, some of it has to go to fund their canvassing campaigns and callers. As a result, these are not necessarily the charitable foundations that you want to give to if you want your money to do the most good.
As a rule of thumb, the greater the proportion of a charitable foundation's work is done by volunteers, the more efficiently your contribution will be used. These charitable foundations have less employees to pay, and as a result they can spend more of their money in doing good works. This is why many people prefer local charities to nationwide ones. In general, local charitable organizations are set up to help a particular problem in a particular community. They can tackle that particular problem very well without wasting resources.
Then again, there is something to be said for giving to more nationwide charitable foundations. They often have really excellent people working for them, and are able to take actions to change public policy. This is particularly true if your charity has more of a political angle to it. It doesn't have to be a political advocacy group, but if it is targeted towards, for example, eradicating homelessness or making sure that all kids have health care, it probably has an excellent public policy division. The bottom line is that it doesn't really matter where you give as long as you give with your heart. Do some research and find out what seems like the best organization to you. Give money if you can, but also try to give your time. You will be glad you did.
Summary
Charitable foundations tend to have the most donations around the Christmas season. Donations are needed year round in order to be most effective, so consider donating at other times or volunteer your services. You can help in more ways than just giving money to your favorite charities.
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