Your Choice Brands sells great granola and donates all profits to customer-designated charities, the best charities to donate to.





Order Today: 413-237-7475

A Note About Researching Charities to Donate to...
from Jeff Greim, Owner/Founder, Your Choice Brands

Nonprofit Charities come in all shapes and sizes. But virtually all of them are designated as 501c-3 organizations by the IRS, the federal agency in charge of regulating the nonprofit sector. Charities apply for this designation because with it comes tax advantages including an exemption from paying federal income taxes, and contributions to the charity being deductible on the donor’s federal income tax return. But this designation also comes with three major legal responsibilities:

the promise to serve the “public good”,
to not use the activities of the charity for private financial gain, and
to abide by certain reporting requirements.

The most important and powerful reporting requirement (except for "houses of worship") is an annual submission to the IRS of FORM 990...

Jeff Greim, Owner/Founder, YCB

Think of FORM 990 as your personal federal income tax return “on steroids.” Not only does it contain financial information such as the charity’s revenues, expenditures, the salaries of its highest paid employees, and the budgets of its major programming areas, it also contains information about how the charity is managed and how decisions are made. And unlike your personal income tax return, FORM 990’s by law must be made available to the public.

As such, FORM 990’s have become an important means for increasing the “transparency” of 501c-3 charities and an important source of information for use by donors and nonprofit “watch-dog” organization to rate the overall quality of all 501c-3 charities. One such “watch-dog” group is Guidestar.org.... there you'll find information on any 501c-3 organization including its Employer Identification Number (EIN), its FORM 990s, Guidestar’s own rating, and much, much more.

Guidestar is one of the most, if not the most, comprehensive source of data on 501c-3 organizations found anywhere. If you want to find out what any charity is doing, Guidestar is an indispensible place to start your investigation. While Guidestar provides additional analysis for a fee, all of the basic information on any 501c-3 nonprofit is available free of charge.