Charity Navigator

Internet lingerie retailer Bare Necessities announced a partnership with The Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF) to raise money through sales of bras and lingerie to support breast cancer research.

As a Corporate Alliance Partner of BCRF, Bare Necessities has agreed to donate a minimum of $10,000 to BCRF in 2011. Bare Necessities donated over $16,000 in 2010 by making a contribution for every bra sold during the month of October, and the company plans to exceed that figure through various online campaigns in 2011.

Oregon Attorney General John Kroger went to the Legislature to press for a law that would enable the state to punish charities with paltry giving. Senate Bill 40 would strip the tax-deductible status from donations to charities that spend less than 30 percent of their annual budget on services. The charities would have to tell potential donors that their giving would not be tax-deductible — or face fines.

General Mills announced the launch of Partners in Food Solutions as a hunger-fighting nonprofit bringing food production and food processing expertise to small and medium-sized food processors in African nations.

The Christian Broadcasting Network's Operation Blessing International has joined relief agencies from the U.S. and around the world for a massive humanitarian relief effort in Japan in the wake of Friday's devastating earthquake and tsunami.

The charity aid organization based in Virginia Beach, Va., already has representatives meeting with Japanese church and government leaders to evaluate people's needs and to see how to help.

The strongest-ever earthquake to hit Japan triggered a tsunami that moved across the Pacific Ocean. The Associated Press reports that at least 300 people have already died.

Here are early responses from large international-aid charities, grant makers, and other groups:

Nearly 60 percent of people who donated to charities involved in the Haiti relief-and-recovery effort said they were either very confident or somewhat confident that their donations were well spent, according to a survey released to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the destructive earthquake.

Only 17 percent of the nearly 2,000 donors studied were not at all confident in how the charities spent money raised to support the relief efforts, said Charity Navigator, a watchdog group in Glen Rock, N.J.

There has been rising dissent from fundraisers about charity watchdog ratings, and it appears Charity Navigator is taking steps to address some of fundraisers' concerns.

Investors demand a good return from their assets. Now donors are increasingly seeking the same for their charitable dollars.

Finding the worthiest, most-efficient organizations to maximize the impact of your donations couldn't be more pressing.

Donors are rethinking their giving strategies, says Patrick Rooney, executive director of the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. "They want to make sure now more than ever that they're using their money wisely."

Charity Navigator, perhaps the largest online source for evaluating nonprofit groups, recently embarked on an overhaul to offer a wider, more nuanced array of information to donors who are deciding which organizations they might help.

Its reinvention coincides with the growing need of nonprofits to provide more — and broader — information about themselves and their impact in an effort to wean donors off a reliance on administrative-cost ratios and other financial metrics that have traditionally been used to assess charities.

If 2010 seemed like a bad year for your favorite charity, just wait for 2011.

Already struggling this year, cash-strapped nonprofits face the prospect of continued high demand with even more cuts next year, especially for those organizations heavily reliant on state and local government funding. And those signs of a slow recovery for the rest of the economy probably won't come in time to buoy the charitable sector in 2011.