Frequently asked questions

The Charity Ranking score (0–100) is our own editorial assessment, produced with a weighted rubric covering program spending, transparency and governance, evidence of impact, cost-effectiveness, and leadership. It draws on publicly available reports from independent evaluators such as GiveWell, Charity Navigator, and CharityWatch, but it is not a rating issued or endorsed by those organisations. The full methodology is on our How We Rank page.

No. We never handle your money. Every donate button on this site links directly to the charity’s own website, where you give to them directly. We have no payment processing, take no commission, and receive no referral fees from charities.

Donations to U.S. registered 501(c)(3) organisations are typically tax-deductible for U.S. taxpayers; rules differ in other countries and for other entity types. The receipt comes from the charity itself, since that’s who you give to. For anything beyond the basics, ask a tax professional — we publish ratings, not tax advice.

From the organisations themselves. Our policy: a cost-per-outcome number appears on this site only if the charity itself publishes that figure — on its donation page, FAQ, gift catalog, or reports. Where no figure is published, we describe what a donation supports without inventing a number. We audited every figure against its source in July 2026; the story is in our Insights article and the changelog.

We use AI research tools to help periodically re-review charity ratings — gathering evaluator reports and drafting proposed score updates. Every AI-assisted review is checked and approved by our editor before anything is published, and each one is logged publicly on the changelog, labeled as AI-assisted. Editorial assessments and articles are human-written.

An advisory is a visible warning we place on an organisation’s profile and rankings card when there are credible, current concerns — for example an active investigation by a regulator, or a significant downgrade under review. It is informational, not a verdict; we remove it when the situation is resolved.

We curate the directory editorially: organisations are included based on independent evaluator coverage, scale, and donor interest across our eight cause areas. Charities cannot pay to be listed, to improve a score, or to remove an advisory. If you think an organisation deserves coverage, suggest it.

By default, everything — your donation log, favourites, and basket — is stored only in your browser (localStorage). Nothing is sent to us unless you choose to sign in with Google, in which case your log syncs to your account so it follows you across devices. You can delete your account and synced data at any time from My Profile.

Tell us via the contact page. If a figure, score input, or fact is wrong, we check it against sources, fix it, and log the correction publicly on the changelog. Corrections are part of the product, not an embarrassment.

No. We are independent. We cite those evaluators’ publicly available research (with links, so you can read the originals), but our scores are our own and no evaluator endorses them.