good, efficient, charities to donate to?
I'm in charge of a fund of about $15,000 worth of money to be donated to charity. I have desecration in choosing where this money is donated and am looking for good charities to donate the money. However, I want to make sure that the money is used in the most efficient method possible for ensuring the most good is done with the least amount of money. This excludes a number of potential charities with otherwise respectable goals. For instance I will not be spending any of the money to assist Japan because, although I would like to aid them in the current crises, a quick investigation into similar natural disasters in the past suggest that so many others will be donating money that there will be an influx of money allocated to disaster recovery but no logistical infrastructure in place (due to the temporary nature of the disaster) to ensure the money is spent wisely once it reaches the disaster area.
I'm looking for examples of charities that not only have a good stated goal, but also can be proven to meet these goals in an efficent manner. Since I may not be aware of ever single charity in the world I'm looking for help finding potential charities worth considering for the donation.
Incidentally as someone that likes and volunteers with children I personally lean towards organizations and charities that work with children; but at this point I'm looking for the name of any respectable charity. The charity must be recognized as a charity by the United States due to the legal nature of the fund.
so..any suggestions for good charities?
Just to clarify I already know about and use charity navigator. What I'm interested in is not how much overhead the charity may have relative to their income, I'll analyze all those details later. When I'm talking about efficiency I mean more the efficiency of the goals driving the charity. For instance I wouldn't donate to a charity with the stated goal of making every child in the US have an Xbox 360 no matter how efficiently the charity is run, because there are far better ways the fund's money can be used to help people then buying a bunch of over priced XBoxs.