Where to give your money

Most who know me know that I believe in giving back – I have a list of organizations to which I contribute here on my site. It takes time to find charities that are a right fit and that are trustworthy – that’s why I was so heartened this morning when I hear on KBCO that Colorado had launched a new website that helps those who want to give money check out potential charities. The site is Check the Charity. As I said I was heartened when I heard about it and quickly went to the site. That’s when my hopes were dashed. Instead of having a simple, intuitive site where those wanting to check out the validity of a charity could go and either enter the name of the charity or pull it down from a list, there is this:

check the charity dotcom

This is not only an unattractive site but it’s not intuitive – which of the four giant buttons does a visitor click on and why? And when a visitor does click on one of the four big button they are taken to a completely different site and the only one that actually offers any kind of information useful to someone coming here to find out about charities is the Attorney General site which gives six tips on charitable giving. The tips are good so I’m going to include them at the end of this post. I am amazed that the state of Colorado could not find someone with appropriate design and development skills to build a site that would actually be useful to people who want to give their money but want to make sure they are doing so responsibly. In this economy they could have had 50 candidates in an hour if they had posted on Craigslist.

The goal of the state of Colorado was a good one. But as is so often the case, the execution is sub-optimal. I would love to see the figures on abandonment for this site. I can image that the majority of people who come here will look at the page, be confused about why they are there and what to do once they are and will leave. A great and altruistic goal – protecting potential donors – will not be achieved because there was no upfront design time spent on this site. It’s a shame really.

A much better site – thought there are problems with the design of this one as well – is Charity Navigator. On this site they did the right thing – they put a search box way up top and highlighted it in yellow so visitors could do what they came to do without hunting, pecking and getting confused and frustrated.

much better, more usable design

The State of Colorado could have used this site as a starting point and made some improvements -hell they could even have simply linked to it and not attempted to reinvent the wheel. Makes me wonder how much of my tax dollars went to the site the Colorado put up.

Here is the six point list fromt he Colorado Attorney General’s site: