The recent $187 million charity fraud scandal involving four cancer charities is plenty to give donors pause. Yet we should always remember that when we’re asked to give, there’s a difference between a great and worthy cause and a great and worthy nonprofit organization. It’s your right as a philanthropist to practice some due diligence (and even some healthy skepticism) before committing your funds to a particular organization. The nonprofits that see more funding are the ones not just doing impressive work but also being transparent about how they’re doing it. Remember, just because someone is asking you to support a worthy effort, doesn’t mean you can’t take some time to consider it—just like you would if someone was selling you an investment or a new product.

Here are some things you can do to avoid charitable fraud:

Our website has a wealth of information and reports on how to get the most charitable bang for your philanthropic buck. In addition to our reports such as Early Childhood Toolkit, Improving Child Survival Rates, and Lifting the Burden of Addiction that point to specific organizations doing effective work worthy of your dollars, we also have these special research reports:

• Rethinking the E-Word (Evidence) To some, the phrase evidence-based philanthropy offers the promise of long-overdue rigor. To others, it represents all that is going wrong with philanthropy and social innovation—the rise of the ivory-tower theorists and technocrats whose logic models and fixation with metrics blind them to real-world knowledge and common sense. It’s time to rethink that pesky E-word, evidence, and use it to get to impact faster.

• Beyond Compliance: Measuring to Learn, Improve, and Create Positive Change At their best, systems for monitoring and measuring nonprofit performance show  what an organization is accomplishing, where its resources are going, and how that organization might address weaknesses and build on successes. At their worst, such systems become an expensive compliance exercise, diverting resources from program delivery without   returning a greater understanding of how to achieve an organization’s goals. With that context in mind, the Center and the Wharton Social Impact Initiative developed this report to tackle questions central to effective philanthropy: How do nonprofits and donors measure and manage results? What tools exist, whom do they serve, which questions do they answer, and what are the challenges in aligning donor and nonprofit measurement and management strategies? Finally, how can we do better—and what can we accomplish by getting measurement right?

• What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Impact? Everybody’s talking about it. Individual donors, foundations, impact investors, and nonprofits all say they want it. But what do they all mean? We examine the different ways people are using the term and the implicit assumptions that can prevent progress toward positive social change. It ends with the three key questions that enable donors to cut through the noise and stay on the path to making the positive difference they seek. Although helpful to all donors interested in practicing high impact philanthropy, the analysis offers specific examples related to addressing the needs of women and girls, thanks to our collaboration with Women Moving Millions. We further reflect on these questions as well as myths that seem to surround all this discussion about measuring and managing to impact in our blog series Five Myths and a Question about Impact.

For these reports and other resources on creating greater social impact, no matter what issue, cause, or community you care about, see Achieving Impact.