Wise Giving Guide

To receive the Guide for a full year, make a contribution to the BBB Wise Giving Alliance by clicking here.

Read our Fall/Holiday 2011 guide here.

The contents of recent Wise Giving Guide cover stories are outlined below. To see the full cover story, click on title of each issue.

Giving: Hard Times, Hard Choices – (The cover story from the Holiday 2008 Wise Giving Guide.) Financial stress is hitting the charitable world hard. Charities look for new ways to cut costs and maintain programs. Donors wonder how they can continue to give effectively. Meanwhile, the need for charities’ services is ever more apparent.  This article outlines some of the changes that donors can expect to see in charity operations and fund raising, describes giving choices available even to cash-strapped donors, and list pointers for smart giving of any kind.

Help! Giving for Disaster Relief – (The cover story from the Fall 2008 Wise Giving Guide.) Americans, famously generous when disasters strike, can quickly turn skeptical about relief charities’ use of their gifts. Unrealistic expectations and outworn ideas about relief work may be responsible. Our article describes features of present-day relief and looks at a new challenge facing charities that provide it—how to convince donors that disasters are most effectively dealt with before they occur.

Volunteer Vacations – (The cover story from the Summer 2008 edition of the Wise Giving Guide.) The chance to do good while vacationing is attracting many Americans to volunteer in charitable programs away from home.  Choosing the kind of volunteer vacation that’s likely to be the most satisfying, however, calls for some of the same considerations involved in giving of other kinds.  We offer tips for learning what’s typically involved in these programs, along with the counsel and comments of seasoned volunteer vacationers.

Charity Mail: Excess? Success?  – (The cover story from the Spring 2008 Wise Giving Guide.) Everyone complains about charity mail, so why does it keep coming? Simply put, it works. How and why it does, and how recipients can better manage that mail and increase the effectiveness of their giving at the same time is the focus of this article.  The article also includes tips for those seeking to reduce the volume of charity direct mail.

Donors in the Dark: When Charities Don’t Disclose – (The cover story from the Holiday 2007 Wise Giving Guide.) What are donors to think when charities they’d like to see evaluated don’t provide information for a BBB Wise Giving Alliance review against its Standards for Charity Accountability?  Charities offer all kinds of reasons for passing up the opportunity.  We discuss nine of the most common ones, with a close look at how the word transparency, so essential to the charitable sector, is often too narrowly understood.