Ask each candidate what it does differently from the next one: Knowing the approach a group takes to a problem will help you decide if it matches your philanthropic goals. Beware of organizations with similar names: The Children’s Wish Foundation, a $15 million nonprofit based in Atlanta, may sound confusingly like the Make-A-Wish Foundation, a $125 million network of 74 local chapters headquartered in Phoenix.

3. How Well Do You Do Your Job? A donor can learn a lot from how a nonprofit tries to evaluate itself. Do not be overly impressed with large numbers unless the numbers are what counts. An arts education program that reaches 25,000 children within a single year may seem effective at first glance, but what is the quality of the experience? Do schools ask for repeat visits? Many organizations, particularly in the human services arena, conduct biannual organization-wide evaluations of their activities that they should be willing to share with important donors. “The rule is, ask the organization what kind of measuring system it has in place,” says Betsy Mangone, vice president of philanthropic services at the Denver Foundation. “Some of their goals may be hard to measure, but listen to what they have to say and consider whether it makes sense to evaluate them in that way.”

When donors contribute to specific programs, they generally do not ask for a customized evaluation of that program unless their gift surpasses $100,000. This is because a study of any sophistication is going to consume at least 10 percent of the program’s budget. In these cases, the donor can discuss with the development officer and program director what to measure and how. The donor can also join with other grantors who are involved in the same program to come up with a standard evaluation format that the nonprofit can use for all donors.

4. What Is Your Per-Unit Cost? Just as some nonprofits tend to hide their actual activities behind a lofty mission statement, they may try to camouflage inefficiency in the guise of nobility. The Hulda B. and Maurice L. Rothschild Foundation was solicited for a grant by a nonprofit that would send handymen to the homes of elderly people who needed household repairs. It sounded good: Rothschild focuses on senior citizens, and its board was all in favor of keeping them at home and out of nursing homes for as long as possible. But when Rothschild President Rob Mayer, the great-nephew of the couple whose fortune endowed the foundation, asked how many home visits the group planned to conduct in a year and how many hours each visit would take, he was surprised. He calculated that the foundation would be paying $150 per hour, or three times the going rate for labor. “It would have been cheaper to have just given the money directly to the homeowners and let them use the Yellow Pages,” he says. “It never occurred to them. The cost was immaterial because they thought they were doing such wonderful work.”

5. Who Is On The Board? A good board requires enough members (at least five) to ensure a diversity of viewpoints and a diversity of loyalties, so that a single trustee cannot dominate the decision making. Directors should collectively know enough about accounting, budgeting and policy to be able to monitor the executive director and select a new one when the time comes. Indeed, a board that is overly beholden to the executive director is dangerous. “Sometimes just looking at the board list can be surprising,” says Judith Stockdale, president of the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelly Foundation. “I’ll see people with the same last name, and I will ask, and they’ll say, ‘Yes, it’s a married couple.’ Or maybe I’ll see relatives of the executive director.”

ANOTHER 30,000 groups dealing with public and private education gained nonprofit tax status. How likely is it you will have heard of any single one?

Ask to meet with a few board members. While you may assume that the nonprofit’s president will have chosen the most enthusiastic trustees, the way they answer questions can still impart to a prospective donor how much energy flows through the organization. “They should be able to give three stories about the organization, things the organization has done,” maintains Julie Holdaway, executive director of San Diego Grantmakers, a donors’ organization. Ask also how many board members donate to the charity; 100 percent is the norm. Both are simple tests of how much a board cares. “I would say that 90 percent of the time when I find an organization is in trouble, it was because the board was ineffective,” says Ron Ancrum, a former consultant who is now director of Associated Grant Makers in Boston.

6. Do You Use Volunteers? This is a favorite line of questioning for Jane Leighty Justis, executive director and trustee of the Leighty Foundation, in part because she has spent ample time as a volunteer and as a trainer of volunteer coordinators. She asks how many volunteers the organization has, what they do, how long they have been volunteers and whether the group employs a trained volunteer coordinator.

Leighty contends that volunteers can be wonderful resources—if they are managed properly. “A lot of organizations operate under the assumption that since volunteers don’t get paid anything, they shouldn’t cost anything either,” she says. Not true: A nonprofit needs one person on staff for whom coordinating volunteers is among the top three responsibilities. Art museums and other organizations with many volunteers may need a volunteer department.

Knowing the approach a group takes to a problem will help you decide if it matches your philanthropic goals.

7. Are You Using Tomorrow’s Revenues Today? This is particularly endemic in arts organizations that may collect subscription receipts one year for next year’s season. “Suppose something cataclysmic were to happen and they were not able to put on a season,” warns Stockdale, the Donnelly president. “What would their liability be to the patrons who bought those tickets?” This practice could even be hiding a deficit that grows larger with each year. Determining whether forward accounting is taking place may be difficult; a large accounts receivable line in a balance statement should prompt further questions.

8. How Many Funders Do You Have? No one wants to punish an organization that has just a few donors. But a short funder list should be a concern. “If a funder has a bad year and pulls back, you still want that organization to survive,” says Michael Bailin, who retired in June as president of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. Try to determine how serious the nonprofit is about finding other means of support, or craft a challenge grant to encourage it to do so.

Previous funders can also be rich sources of information, and the organization should be happy to put you in touch with them. John E. Larsen, the secretary of the John Larsen Foundation, which is named after his grandfather, was considering giving to a gay and lesbian group in Minneapolis, yet was concerned that it lacked a long-term plan. He talked with an officer from another larger foundation that had worked with the group for some time and who confirmed his fears. The Larsen Foundation ended up giving the money, but less than was asked for, and it required the group to do some planning for the future.

9. Will You Get The Job Done? The project you fund may be postponed or abandoned for innocent enough reasons. The Larsen Foundation provided a grant to a wildlife group to relocate wild turkeys to less populated areas one year. “But it turned out there wasn’t enough snowfall that winter, and they couldn’t set the traps,” recalls Larsen. “They held on to the money and did it the following year, but we would have liked to have given that money away to an organization that really needed it then.” Now the Larsens ask grant recipients to sign contracts that require them to return the money if they will not use it immediately.

10. Who Will Succeed The Executive Director? A United Way of New York survey two years ago found that just one-quarter to one-third of its grant recipients had succession plans in place. Considering that the same survey found that 45 percent of executive directors planned to step down in the next five years, many nonprofit organizations risk faltering during rocky transitions. A board should have an idea of how to appoint a successor and have an assistant director in place who is competent to serve as interim director. “If all they said was, ‘We’ll do a national search,’ we’ll tell them, ‘It’s important to fix on this with a little bit more certainty,’ ” the Clark Foundation’s Bailin explains. The succession plan should be a document that designates the open position’s job description and which committee will conduct a search. 

Matthew Schuerman, a Brooklyn resident, writes on philanthropy and teaches at New York University.