(Illustration by Natalie Andrewson / New York Times News Service)

Donating to charities this time of year used to be relatively efficient and painless. After watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, you plunked some money into a Salvation Army bucket, wrote some checks, contributed some household items and were done.

Yet with charities increasingly involved in awareness campaigns, complex networks of cause marketing and often exorbitant overhead, donating to the most effective charity has never been more challenging.

If you are a discriminating giver, you will need a set of guidelines that can tell you whether your donation will mostly be spent on a charity’s mission and not peripheral activities. These days you have to use your head far more than your heart to see that your charitable dollars are well spent on causes you care about.

There are services and strategies that you can use to make an informed decision. Most of them can help you determine whether your dollars will reach the charity’s “mission” — and whether a nonprofit organization is effective in what it is striving to do.

Charities are witnessing greater selectivity among donors, probably driven by the pinch of a sluggish economy.

According to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, a trade newspaper for the nonprofit sector, donations to the top 400 fundraising charities are slowing this year after having gained 4 percent in 2012. Last year, the top nonprofits took in about $81 billion.

Although such things are hard to measure, it is possible that donors have become more sophisticated in their giving as useful information on charities has become more detailed. Yet it is easy to get distracted by ubiquitous causes that blanket every corner of society. Here, a guide to navigating the thicket.

The major services

One of the first stops in searching for charities is GuideStar, which contains records from 1.8 million nonprofits registered with the Internal Revenue Service.

The free component of the GuideStar website provides access to each organization’s Form 990, the basic IRS filing document for nonprofits. That is useful on the front end if you want basic information on a charity’s income, spending, mission and executive salaries.

As with the other services, you can also pay for “premium” services from GuideStar that provide more financial analysis and access to a nonprofit’s contractors. This would help if you wanted to perform detailed comparisons of charities or to explore their financial ratios or executive compensation in greater depth.

What GuideStar does not do is give a qualified rating of a charity. It tries to remain neutral and “is not a charity evaluator,” says Lindsay J.K. Nichols, a spokeswoman. For more intensive evaluations, you need to go to the BBB Wise Giving Alliance or Charity Navigator.

The BBB Wise Giving Alliance, affiliated with the Council of Better Business Bureaus, has free reviews of 1,300 national charities; local BBBs have evaluations on an additional 10,000. The group applies 20 “accountability” standards — governance, oversight, effectiveness and the like — once every two years at no charge to the charities, but it does not explicitly rate them using a star or letter system.

The alliance will specify if a charity does not meet BBB standards or “did not disclose the requested information.” About 40 percent of the charities evaluated meet all 20 benchmarks; ones that do are designated a “BBB Accredited Charity.”

To customize a search and get charity-specific ratings, Charity Navigator, which evaluates about 7,000 nonprofits, has an easy-to-use interface to find charities that match donors’ interests.

Focusing on financial health, accountability and transparency, Charity Navigator applies an analysis to each of its charities to come up with its star ratings (with four stars as the highest rank). It examines federal Form 990s to see how much of a charity’s income goes toward programs and what percentage is spent on administration and fundraising. Of the three major services, Charity Navigator is the easiest to use.

Generally, a good benchmark for a worthwhile charity is having at least 75 percent of income spent on programs, or the nonprofit’s mission, according to Sandra Miniutti, a spokeswoman for Charity Navigator.

Aside from vetting a charity’s financials, Miniutti suggests, donors should “understand the charity’s mission — pick just a few, do your research and stick with them over time.”

Getting granular

Want to dig deeper and go beyond the charity information services? You can use them to find basic information on revenue, fundraising and spending, but you will need to go several layers deeper if you want additional scrutiny. Here are some major issues to consider:

• Have you compared the charity’s Form 990 with its annual report and audited financial statements?

The 990 can often be opaque and may not tell you particulars on an organization’s specific programs. You may need an accountant or financial adviser acquainted with nonprofit accounting to review these documents; the audited financials contain much more detail.

• Does the charity practice “joint cost allocation?”

This is accounting jargon for lumping in fundraising or solicitation with the charity’s program expenses. According to the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, more than 20 percent of nationally solicited charities it reviews employ this practice, which could muddy the waters in gauging how much is really being spent on the charity’s mission. To get a clearer picture, you will need to identify the charity’s primary purpose. If it is mainly a grass-roots lobbying or public awareness organization (which means that you may not be able to deduct your donation), then joint cost allocation may make sense. If it devotes its efforts to financing research, then the allocation may be a red flag.

• How does the charity evaluate its effectiveness?

You should be able to see some examples in its annual reports. Also, ask the charity directly about its successes. Does the organization use independent auditors to benchmark its performance? Where has it failed? A transparent charity should provide this information along with progress reports.

Eric Friedman, author of “Reinventing Philanthropy” (Potomac Books, 2013), says charities that cannot gauge their effectiveness through benchmarks “may have effective programs, but it’s hard for donors to understand how effective or compare them to other options. I’ve stopped focusing on financial measures, which can be misleading.”

• Is the mission supported by academic research?

Organizations may be funding ineffective ways of addressing their mission. A boutique charity information service like GiveWell recommends only three organizations a year out of the hundreds it has considered since its founding in 2007. GiveWell performs extensive research to show that recommended charities are “proven, cost-effective, scalable and transparent,” said Alexander Berger, its senior research analyst. “Because we’re aiming to find the best giving opportunities possible — not to rate every charity — we don’t research charities that are unlikely to excel on our criteria.”

• Watch out for red flags.

Because nonprofit accounting and reporting can be incomplete, suspicious activity can be hidden. Daniel Borochoff, president of CharityWatch, formerly known as the American Institute of Philanthropy, rates 600 charities with a grading system from A to F — and takes a watchdog approach that tries to expose nonprofit abuses. “There’s a lot of sneaky reporting going on,” Borochoff said. He said chicanery could often be found in “gifts in kind,” where donations may be overvalued, or in organizations with emotional appeals — some charities involving animals, children, first responders and veterans. They may be little more than aggressive fundraising operations that do little for their missions, or funds that are diverted to officers or other purposes.

• Do you need comprehensive advice?

If you are also concerned about tax or estate planning considerations, it would make sense to work with a wealth manager, estate-planning lawyer or certified financial planner. Many advisers also have insights into nonprofit accounting that can help you vet a charity on a deeper level. Robert DiQuollo, chief executive of Brinton Eaton Wealth Advisors in Madison, N.J., said he could scrutinize nonprofit line items like executive salaries and program-related expenses. “We always approach the charity directly,” DiQuollo said, “to make sure that the charity is spending money on what the donor wants.”

• Is the charity sitting on too much cash?

You need to know whether the charity is putting its cash to good use or reserving it for some other purpose. According to Wise Giving Alliance standards, “the charity’s unrestricted net assets available for use should not be more than three times the size of the past year’s expenses or three times the size of the current year’s budget, whichever is higher.” This is something you may need an experienced accountant to evaluate. The bottom line: As a donor, you need to know whether your money will be put to work immediately or sidelined.