The Holiday Charity Giving Guide: No Gift Too Small

We teamed up with Charity Navigator to select 20 great organizations and to help you with smart charity giving for the holidays. So what does it mean to the orgs who made the grade to receive your donations?

The needs are great, so no gift is too small.

Susana Della Maddalena, VP and executive director of PetSmart Charities, our top pick in the Being a Friend to Fido category, reports that the organization gets most of its voluntary support through $1, $5 and $10 gifts that customers can opt into at the checkout counter in PetSmart stores. "All donations help us save the lives of homeless pets," she said.

Randi Hogan, Chief Development Officer at ActionAid International USA, our top pick in the Doing Good Globally category, says that a single dollar has tremendous power.

"A dollar goes incredibly far and provides incredible impact for the people we’re working alongside across the world," she said. For example, a gift of just $50 is enough to provide 10 farm families seeds and tools to rebuild their livelihoods, and $500 could give 250 people proper sanitation for the first time in their lives.

As ActionAid opts not to pursue the big government and corporate grants that other large NGOs depend on, smaller gifts from individuals and foundations are vitally important and rigorously stewarded.

"We’re very mindful of how we’re using every dollar that our donors contribute so that we can reach the vision that we have of ending poverty and the injustices that cause it," said Hogan.

Nan Roman, President and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, agrees that each small donation is important, noting that bigger gifts often come with strings attached.

"A single donation can have a lot of impact," she said. "Smaller donations add up so we can be flexible and respond to things as they emerge and do the things we think are most important at any given moment. Sometimes the bigger donations are more restricted."

With such a range of organizations to give to, each one running a variety of programs in its area of need, your only problem is going to be deciding. Della Maddalena emphasized that donors' gifts will support a range of efforts that help animals, such as spay-neuter promotion, rescue-wagon and emergency relief programs, and in-store pet adoption efforts. Donors, she said, like to support the charity "for the variety of ways in which we help homeless pets."

Each organization on the list offers just as much value for your donation buck. With 10 categories, each with a top pick and runner up, our charity giving guide will amaze you with the variety of ways great organizations are helping all manner of people, animals and natural habitats in the US and around the world.

How We Made Our Picks

Charity Navigator employs a rating system to evaluate how efficiently organizations use donors' money and how likely that level of management is to extend into the future. The Charity Navigator team rates each charity in two major areas of financial health: organizational efficiency and organizational capacity.

In looking at organizational efficiency, Charity Navigator measures what percent of the total functional expenses goes toward programs and services (higher is better), management and general expenses (lower is better), and fundraising (lower is better). Another factor is fundraising efficiency, or the amount a charity spends to raise one dollar.

In assessing organizational capacity, the trick is to measure the average annual growth of primary revenue and program expenses over the three to five most recent fiscal years (higher is better), as well as the length of time an organization could sustain current spending using only its available assets (higher is better).

The scores from the rating system are combined to create an overall score, which is used to compare a charity to all the others in the sample, to similar organizations and to a small set of charities in the organization's peer group. This analysis determines the number of stars (up to four) an organization receives.

We stuck to four-star ("exceptional") charities in creating our list to make sure you'll only be giving to groups that will use your donation wisely. And while a search of the Charity Navigator site will reveal many top-rated regional and local organizations, we limited our search in most cases to national and international organizations to interest as many readers as possible. We also focused on finding organizations that would appeal to the general public.

Finally, the categories we developed are broad, and were chosen because they're consistently popular (donating to animal welfare or environmental organizations), timely (veteran's resources and giving to children), or have general appeal (orgs benefiting the ill and elderly or the arts).

See our full list of organizations here, and be sure to leave information about your favorite charity organizations in the comments below.