Charities, where does your money do the most good?

This photo was posted by GlobalGiving, which received a four-star rating
from Charity Navigator.

     Every time we suffer a major disaster in this country, social media is clogged almost immediately with appeals for money.
     Many are bogus, using the disaster to cheat people out of money and some others are so inefficient you wouldn't want them handling your contribution. Some of the biggest are criticized for paying large salaries to executives.
     So how are we, who have little time to research, able to sort them out and find a place to send our money where it will do the most good?
     Well, I have a friend who works for an organization that raises money for charities and recently she took offense at a facebook post that unfairly criticized many charities with outdated and sometimes just wrong information about some of the most well-known charities.
    This time around Red Cross seems to take more criticism than usual. For instance, the post on facebook says Red Cross CEO makes an annual salary of $651,957 plus expenses and one post rated its efficiency at 39 percent, meaning 61 percent of donations went to salaries and administrative costs. However responsible raters say Red Cross is around 92 percent efficient and the CEO salary is around $100,000 less than the reported number which was also 10 years old. That is just one example.
   One fallacy in the whole argument according to my friend is, "the part of an insidious notion that working for a nonprofit should be its own reward and that employees of all levels, not just senior executives, should not be remunerated fairly, despite the skills, hard work and challenging conditions that they work to address. But nonprofit employees have rent and mortgages, student loans, car insurance etc. If we want qualified people they need to be able to live and their employees need to get somewhere near competitive salary levels to attract and retain staff."
   That being said, this post is not about arguing the various aspects of charity operations. More is is supposed to provide some information to help people sort out the charities and make responsible choices about where we give our money.
    In comments to the post two sources for reliable information came up,
The first came from the fact-checking site Snopes which provided updated information about the organizations mentioned in the original post. Charitable compensation is the title of the Snopes article. Find it at http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/charities.asp

The second is Charity Navigator which keeps tabs on more than 8,900 charities worldwide. That seems to be the go-to source for major news outlets. Specific to Hurricane Harvey the link is https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=5239&from=homepage
On that page charities seeking funds for aid in that emergency are rated and confirmed so for anyone wishing to make a donation that would be a good place to start.

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