How to tell whether a childhood cancer charity deserves your money

Someone calls you during dinner. The name of the charity has the word children in it, and the word cancer, and the person on the phone is warm and unhurried and knows exactly how to say the thing that makes you reach for your wallet.

You want to help, and helping ought to be easy. The problem is that standing in your kitchen with the phone against your shoulder, you have no way of knowing whether you are.

Four services will do most of the work of closing that gap. None will do all of it, and the gaps matter more than the grades.

What do the rating services actually measure?

Each of the four measures a different thing, and not one of them measures whether a charity is any good at helping a child with cancer. They measure the paperwork around the work.

CharityWatch grades financial efficiency and nothing else. Its criteria page says so plainly: the letter grades "are based solely on financial efficiency measurements." It runs two calculations — program expenses as a share of total expenses, and the cost to raise $100 in related contributions — and averages them into a grade from A+ to F. That same page, checked in October 2026, says it rates over 600 charities. There are vastly more than 600 charities.

The BBB Wise Giving Alliance does the opposite. It ignores grades and runs 20 pass-or-fail standards across governance, measuring effectiveness, finances, and solicitation materials. Some are financial — Standard 8 requires a charity to "spend at least 65% of its total expenses on program activities," Standard 9 that it "spend no more than 35% of related contributions on fund raising." Most are structural. Standard 2 requires a board of at least five voting members. Standard 3 requires at least three evenly spaced meetings a year, two of them face to face, with a majority attending on average. Proxies do not count.

Charity Navigator scores a mix across four beacons — Accountability & Finance, Impact & Measurement, Leadership & Planning, Culture & Compensation — and turns it into zero to four stars. Its methodology page sets a hard gate: a charity needs three years of IRS Form 990 filings, and "990EZ, 990N, and 990PF filings do not qualify."

Candid, which runs GuideStar, is the one most often misread. Its Seals of Transparency — Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum — measure how much a charity is willing to tell you about itself. Bronze means someone logged in, confirmed the profile and clicked publish. Gold means they filled in financial fields, and Candid's own explainer notes an audit is not required. Platinum means at least one metric was entered. A Platinum seal is a real signal about disclosure, not about quality.

One more thing about the BBB reports. Their labels include Meets Standards, Standards Not Met, Did Not Disclose, Review in Progress and Unable to Verify. Did Not Disclose does not mean a charity failed. It means it was asked and did not answer. Whether those amount to the same thing is your call, but know which you are reading.

What does the overhead ratio really tell you?

Less than you have been told, and the people who publish the ratios said so first.

In 2013 the heads of the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, GuideStar and Charity Navigator — the three organizations most responsible for the public's attachment to the overhead ratio — co-signed an open letter to the donors of America asking them to stop using it as a measure of performance. Their words: overhead is "a poor measure of a charity's performance." They asked donors to weigh transparency, governance, leadership and results instead, and wrote that "the people and communities served by charities don't need low overhead, they need high performance."

Two reasons, and both hold up.

A low overhead ratio can be manufactured. When the FTC and all 50 states brought their 2015 case against four sham cancer charities, part of the allegation was that the operations had reported more than $223 million in donated gifts in kind they were only passing through — which made their overhead look far lower than it was. A charity that wants a flattering ratio can get one.

And some charities ought to spend more on overhead than they do. Training, planning and systems are what let an organization keep a promise at scale. A charity that will not pay for an audit is cheaper. It is not better.

So what is the ratio good for? The extremes, which the letter grants can flag fraud or poor financial management. If 85 cents of your dollar is going to fundraising, that is not a nuance. Everything in between is noise, and treating it as a league table rewards the charities best at looking frugal rather than the best at the work.

What are the warning signs?

A name built to be confused with one you trust, programs described without a single named hospital or city, a professional fundraiser keeping most of the gift, urgency about your card number, and no straight answer to a direct question. The 2015 FTC case is the most useful teaching document in this field, because the four operations it named — Cancer Fund of America, Cancer Support Services, Children's Cancer Fund of America, and The Breast Cancer Society — were not crude. They were plausible for years, and the FTC said they took in more than $187 million. What it alleged, turned into things you can watch for:

• A name that sounds like a name you trust. Children's Cancer Fund of America is built to be mistaken for something else. Search the exact legal name, not the phrase on the envelope.
• Programs described in the abstract. The FTC said these charities claimed to provide pain medication, transport to chemotherapy and hospice care. Ask which hospital. Ask which city. Ask how many families last year. Vagueness is the tell.
• Professional fundraisers taking the bulk of the gift. The FTC alleged fundraisers often kept 85 percent or more of each donation. Those payments appear on a Form 990.
• Urgency. Nobody honest needs your card number before you can hang up.
• No answer to a direct question. This one costs nothing and catches the most. Ask who received money last year and how much. Then see what comes back, and how fast.

How do I check a charity's tax status myself?

In about four minutes, for free, at IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search. It is the most useful link in this piece.

It covers several databases at once. Pub 78 data tells you whether the organization is eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions. The auto-revocation list tells you whether the IRS has revoked its exempt status for failing to file — a charity can keep a polished website long after that has happened. Determination letters show the IRS actually granted the status. And you can pull its Form 990 series returns, or its Form 990-N if it is small.

Search by exact legal name or, better, by EIN. If a charity will not give you its EIN, that is your answer.

Two cautions. The IRS notes that updates are delayed for paper-filed 990 returns received in 2021 and later, so a blank year proves nothing. And finding a charity in there proves it is registered and current, not that the program is real. Registration is a floor, not a recommendation.

How should I judge The Undefeated Fund?

With the same tests. Some of them will come back empty, and I would rather tell you that here than have you find it yourself and wonder why I did not.

We are small and we are young. Run us through the four services and here is the mechanics of it. CharityWatch rates a few hundred charities, chosen for scale, so a charity our size will not have a letter grade there. Charity Navigator requires three years of full Form 990 filings and says 990-N returns do not qualify — and the IRS sets that short e-Postcard for organizations whose gross receipts are normally $50,000 or less, the territory a charity our size lives in. A star rating is not something we can buy or earn yet. It is something we have to get old enough for. A Candid seal we could obtain by filling in a form, which is why I would not ask you to weigh it heavily.

An absence of ratings on a small charity is not evidence of wrongdoing. It is also not evidence of anything good. Charity Navigator's own guidance for unrated charities sends donors to the Form 990 to look at program share, revenue sources, executive pay, use of professional fundraisers, board and staff disclosure, and the charity's own account of what it accomplished. That is the right instruction and it applies to us.

So here is what does work on us, today:

1. Look us up in IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search. Confirm the exempt status, and that we are not on the auto-revocation list.
2. Read the list of causes we have vetted. Every organization we pass money to was run through these same four services before it went on that page. If you think one does not belong, tell us and say why.
3. Ask us the direct question. Who received money, how much, when. Then judge the answer, and how long it took.
4. Read who we are and decide whether the account of why this exists holds together.

Then apply the hardest test, which no rating service runs. Ask whether the organization is honest about what it does not know. A charity that tells you it is unrated, and why, is giving you something a four-star rating cannot: a way to check.

I publish the tests that come back empty on us because a donor who knows how to evaluate a charity is worth more to this field than a donor who trusts one. If these four minutes send your money somewhere else, because somewhere else answered better, that is the system working. Giving well is a skill, and a satisfying one to get good at. If you came here because of a gold ribbon on somebody's jacket and wanted to know what it meant first, start there.

The causes we have vetted are listed on our charities page. Check them the same way you would check us.

Danny H. Levin — founder, and part of Austin's family.