Most giving advice tells you to check an organization’s overhead ratio. That is close to the least informative number available, and organizations have learned to manage it. Seven questions produce a far better picture, and none of them require accounting expertise. They take about twenty minutes for any organization you are seriously considering.
1. Is it actually registered, and can you confirm that yourself?
Start with the boring verification, because everything downstream depends on it. The IRS runs a Tax Exempt Organization Search tool that tells you whether an organization is currently eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions and what deductibility limits apply.
Search by name or by EIN. If an organization’s status has been revoked, the tool will say so. If an organization is reluctant to give you its EIN, that reluctance is your answer.
This step is not about suspecting fraud. Legitimate organizations lose exempt status for administrative reasons, including failure to file required returns for three consecutive years. Checking is quick and it is the only way to know.
2. What does the organization say it does, in one sentence?
Ask this of the organization’s own materials, not of a review site. An organization with a clear mission can state it plainly. An organization that needs three paragraphs of abstraction to describe its work often has a diffuse program, a communications problem, or both.
Watch specifically for the difference between what an organization values and what it does. “We believe every family deserves stability” is a value. “We provide emergency rental assistance in four counties” is a program. Both can appear on a website. Only one tells you where money goes.
3. Where does the money actually go?
Most tax-exempt organizations file an annual return, and those filings are public. They show revenue, expenses, executive compensation and program spending categories.
Read them for structure rather than for a single ratio. A newly formed organization will look different from a fifty-year-old one, and a research and advocacy group will have a different cost profile than a food distribution operation. Low overhead is not automatically good. An organization that underinvests in staff, systems and evaluation is not efficient. It is fragile.
The genuinely useful signals are whether compensation looks proportionate to the organization’s size, whether revenue sources are diversified enough to survive one donor leaving, and whether spending matches the mission described in question two.
4. Does it publish data you can independently check?
This separates organizations doing analytical work from organizations recycling other people’s talking points. An organization that publishes figures should name where each one came from, and those sources should be primary: the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Reserve, KFF, or comparable bodies.
Spot-check two or three figures against the original series. You will learn more about an organization’s rigor in ten minutes of spot-checking than in an hour of reading its mission statement.
Organizations working on economic affordability tend to maintain data pages for exactly this purpose. Fight For A Living Wage, a nonpartisan grassroots 501(c)(3), keeps a research library and a public statistics hub, and it has also published its own comparison of organizations working on poverty, which is worth reading the way you would read any interested party’s list, as one input rather than a verdict.
5. Is it treating a symptom or a system, and does it say which?
Both are legitimate. A food bank feeding people this week is doing necessary work. An organization researching why food costs outpaced wages is doing different necessary work. Problems arise when an organization blurs the two, implying systemic change while delivering direct services, or implying direct impact while doing research.
Decide which you want to fund, then check that the organization actually does it. The mismatch between donor expectation and organizational activity is a more common source of disappointment than any misconduct.
6. What does it promise, and is that promise possible?
This is the sharpest filter on the list. Be skeptical of any organization that tells you what your specific donation will accomplish, or that attaches urgency to the timing of your gift.
Claims worth distrusting include guaranteed policy outcomes, precise causal attribution of a broad social change to one organization’s work, and any framing suggesting a window is closing. Systemic problems do not resolve on a fundraising calendar, and an organization that says otherwise is describing its revenue needs rather than the world.
Organizations doing honest work on hard problems tend to be careful about causation, because they know how hard attribution is. That carefulness reads as less exciting. It is a good sign.
7. What do you want this money to do?
The last question is about you, and skipping it is why people give once and never again.
Giving to relieve immediate suffering, giving to change the rules that produce the suffering, and giving to a community you belong to are three different goals. They point to different organizations. None is superior, and an organization that is excellent at one may be poor at another.
Deciding this first also protects you from the most effective fundraising techniques, which work by supplying urgency and specificity that the donor has not independently chosen.
A note on the numbers behind all of this
Scale is worth holding in mind while evaluating any organization working on economic hardship. KFF analysis of Census survey data, published in 2022 and reflecting 2021, found at least $220 billion in medical debt owed in the United States, and a KFF and NPR investigation the same year found roughly 100 million adults carrying some form of health care debt. Child Care Aware reports center-based childcare commonly running $10,000 to $17,000 or more per child per year.
Against figures of that size, no individual donation moves the aggregate. That is not an argument against giving. It is an argument for choosing deliberately, since the value of a gift depends far more on where it goes than on the fact that it happened.
Run the seven questions. Most organizations pass. The ones that do not tend to fail early, usually on questions one, four or six, and finding that out costs twenty minutes.
