Any local education you want to support?
You may want to reach out to your local Executive Service Corps (or similar organizations) to find the promising charities they work with (many will be highlighted in their annual reports).
Your local United Way can also connect you to the organizations that loan money to growing non-profits for things like their first non-donated physical space. This is usually a big hurdle, and one that banks don't want to get involved in (because the last thing they want is the foreclosure on a popular non-profit to be on the front page of the local newspaper... it's bad for business, so they never take the risk). Setting up a loan insurance buffer or getting the promising charities to which they have loaned money is another source of ideas.
A few other thoughts about non-profit support:
There are many ways to measure non-profits. Some base it on overhead and will claim overhead is "bad". Others like what supermatthew posted are very "Effective Altruism" focused and have their own quirks. Others are criticized for large salaries of executives, when it's possible it's still well under the market rate for the necessary skills to make a large organization effective. While I have opinions none are strictly "right" or "wrong"... though these measures can make local or national organizations not look good, depending on the lens through which the system is viewed. What is useful is to understand some of the major points of evaluation you can use in order to make that determination yourself. It's no different than informing yourself about taxes or investments to retire... nothing here is necessarily a red flag, but each thing is data to consider.
Things to consider (in no particular order):
- Where is the charity in its lifecycle? Has the charity been running for a long time, or is it newer? Some organizations that support "capacity building" in a charity expect a charity to "scale up" within 5-7 years of launch... if it's past that timeframe, then it's time to dig deeper.
- What is the natural scope of the non-profit? (and is it anywhere near the necessary scope)? If a charity is serving 1 out of 20,000 underserved students (for example), it has plenty of room to grow. Food banks, while they need incremental funds (and I support my local food bank as well), aren't looking at 10000%+ necessary growth. There are a massive number of TINY charities in the US. Some are deservedly so, since they are serving smaller, localized needs. Even a charity that is nearing the $200K/year budget for the full form 990 is getting toward the "upper middle" size of charities. Getting across the "scale" boundary is where many non-profits fail... and part of that is that so many people want to "buy programs". No one wants to build and be part of the overhead, but "building" is critical. See:
http://www.nonprofitfinancefund.org/sites/default/files/docs/2010/BuildingIsNotBuying.pdf- Related to building... Is the overhead related to physical infrastructure that is strictly necessary? An on-line mentoring non-profit should have remarkably low physical overhead. One that needs a (fire-safe and bathroom rich) physical location to do childhood education is going to have to pay for a fairly expensive building (and allocating that out as non-overhead is not always possible - especially due to the Catch-22 of needing a building in order to be able to run programs). All overhead is not created equal, and it may require some talking to the organization to understand how the funds are really spent. Learn about their funding model, see:
http://www.bridgespan.org/Publications-and-Tools/Funding-Strategy/Ten-Nonprofit-Funding-Models.aspx to educate yourself first... as a side note, think of what it means if a charity doesn't fit easily in these models and thus how it would benefit from additional funds or if it even deserves them (are you just extending something that will fail eventually - or if the cause is important enough whether the risk is worth it)... also think about where you will be rounding error to some existing endowment or government funding.
- What is the fundraising cost actually doing? Recognize that any fundraising inherently is designed to pay back the costs of that fundraising. It also may be used to then get others to give. We naturally think of fundraising cost as not-so-great overhead, but this talk gives an opposite perspective, to at least get you thinking:
https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong - If the non-profit will run at scale (think >$200K), who are the community supporters? Are there local (business) leaders on the board? If a $25K emergency arose (for which we hope there is some reserve and for which we also hope it doesn't happen) - who is there first with the rescue check?
The biggest challenge in dealing with scaling non-profits is the time sensitivity. If you have no idea when the gift will be received by the charity, it gets tricky to really support the ones that could use the money most effectively... so community foundations could serve as a point to regrant the money once they did an analysis of need, or you could directly support the non-profits that help other non-profits get up to self-supporting scale.