I strongly disagree with the idea of impulse donations in this thread. Rigorous evaluation of charitable effectiveness, even where the aims are well-defined (e.g. saving lives or life-years over a short local time-horizon) is very difficult work: read about the adventures of GiveWell, a nonprofit that analyzes charities for effectiveness in various such categories. Making donations based on these short comments would be like investing in a startup company based on a 2 minute elevator pitch with no other data.
I would advise giving to pay for research into charitable effectiveness before any specific charity, e.g. GiveWell or the MIT Poverty Action Lab, but neither has a broad enough mandate (yet, GiveWell is interested in going into evaluation of the existential risk category in addition to their current domains) to evaluate the highest return domains.
Watch out for Scope Insensitivity!
I never give to any charity, all information I have makes me strongly believe that increasing per capita income is the best long term solution to most of the problems. I believe there are a few exceptions, polio eradication effort comes to mind, that can give important and lasting results for little money, but I have seen very little research supporting any of them.
So GiveWell gets my vote, even if not my money - no rationalist should be giving any money to any charity that doesn't publish its effectiveness data.
Related to: Can Humanism Match Religion's Output?
I thought it would be helpful for us to have a central space to pool information about various organizations to which we might give our money and/or time. Honestly, a wiki would be ideal, but it seems this should do nicely.
Comment to this post with the name of an organization, and a direct link to where we can donate to them. Provide a summary of the group's goals, and their plans for reaching them. If you can link to outside confirmation of the group's efficiency and effectiveness, please do so.
Respond to these comments adding information about the named group, whether to criticize or praise it.
Hopefully with the voting system, we should be able to collect the most relevent information we have available reasonably quickly.
If you choose to contribute to a group, respond to that group's comment with a dollar amount, so that we can all see how much we have raised for each organization.
Feel free to replace "dollar amount" with "dollar amount/month" in the above, if you wish to make such a commitment. Please do not do this unless you are (>95%) confident that said commitment will last at least a year.
If possible, mention this page, or this site, while donating.