My advice: don’t over-generalize. There’s no easy solution for knowing what public sources to believe, in the face of lots of conflicting, unreliable information that’s purpose-designed to get your money and attention.
Instead, pick a few instances and dive deep—both into their referrals (people you kind-of-trust who endorse them) and into their hard-to-fake documentation (how long they’ve been doing their work, what are their goals and how are they measuring, what ratings or evaluation agencies say about them).
Alternately, if these are relatively small amounts you’re spreading thin (tens to hundreds a year across multiple targets), pick somewhat randomly by sector/cause, and just hope you’ll mostly do some good.
My advice: don’t over-generalize. There’s no easy solution for knowing what public sources to believe, in the face of lots of conflicting, unreliable information that’s purpose-designed to get your money and attention.
Instead, pick a few instances and dive deep—both into their referrals (people you kind-of-trust who endorse them) and into their hard-to-fake documentation (how long they’ve been doing their work, what are their goals and how are they measuring, what ratings or evaluation agencies say about them).
Alternately, if these are relatively small amounts you’re spreading thin (tens to hundreds a year across multiple targets), pick somewhat randomly by sector/cause, and just hope you’ll mostly do some good.