3 easy ways to vet a charity before giving

ATLANTA - Fall is here, and we are now moving into the holiday season: Thanksgiving. Duwali. Hannukah. Christmas. We feel the urge to give or help others, but be careful because not all charities are created equally.  

Let's be honest, when you are feeling the spirit of giving, it's easy to just do that - to give - and not ask too many questions. So the best thing to do is to vet your favorite charities now before you impulsively send a hundred dollars.

First, narrow down things that are important to you. Maybe it's something with a religious component. Maybe it's based solely on your desire to help improve the lives of children. Maybe it's building homes for single moms.  Whatever it is, there is surely something out there for you. But you do have to wade through the good and the bad to find a good fit. 

Second, after you have decided where you want your money to go, stop at these three sites to verify the legitimacy of the organization: Charity Navigator, Charity Watch, and the Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving Alliance. These groups do the leg work for you. But you should also do Internet searches to look for any troubling complaints for a favored charity.

Third, one thing folks like is for most of the money to go to the giving element and not so much to salaries, overhead, things like that. But that's not always a true read. Some charities require more overhead. Small, underpaid staff is not always way to get the work done.

In a newly published report, two assistant professors says that charities today may need to spend a third of their budget on overhead. This does not meet up with conventional wisdom of 25 to 30 percent. But here's why they say things are changing; in the arts for example, the 10-year study shows that when they devoted 35 percent of their budget to the back office work that it improved museum and theater attendance, not shoe-string budgets.

Lots of things to take into account before you donate.