Choose Your Charities Carefully :
Keep records of solicitations and other materials to help you prioritize your gifts among the many organizations that ask for your support. Watchdog organizations including the Philanthropic Advisory Service of the Council of Better Business Bureaus (703-276-0100 or http://www.bbb.org) and the National Charities Information Bureau (212-929-6300 or http://www.give.org) publish lists to help you find out how reputable your chosen charities are and how much of your contributions will be used for actual programs.

Use the Internet:
There are a number of online sources you can use to see how your favorite charities put your money to use.

• To determine if a fundraising appeal is valid try the Internet Nonprofit Center (http://www.nonprofits.org). Here you'll find the IRS database of every group that is registered as a charity - 1.2 million nonprofit in all.
• Many charities have their own Web page. You can use the Nonprofit Web Site Directory (http://www.idealist.org) to locate many of them. Organized by the Contact Center Network, this database lists 8,500 individual nonprofit sites.
• For a charity that supports a specific issue, see the Independent Charities of America (http://www.independentcharities.org). Enter the type of charity you want, for example "Education," and the database will sort through the ICA's members and provide you with a list of names, addresses, phone numbers and descriptions of those charities.

Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund is a public charity and donor advised fund. Various Fidelity Investments companies provide investment management and administrative services to the Charitable Gift Fund.

© 1998 Charitable Gift Fund