No, don't go to Charity Navigator, go to Givewell (http://www.givewell.com). The quality of their research is much better, and they focus on the question that really matters: what effect your donation will have on the margin.
It's good to do things where you can witness and verify what's going on, but soup kitchens are many orders of magnitude less effective than distributing insecticide-treated bednets to combat malaria, or Givewell's other recommended charities.
soup kitchens and bednet distribution programs are trying to solve two different sets of problems, so I am not sure what you mean when you say that one is 'orders of magnitude less effective' than the other
The problem with all the talk about 'effective charity' is that it invariably focuses on magnitude while ignoring sign. The great thing about donating to local soup kitchens as opposed to interfering in other people's countries thousands of miles away where we know little or nothing about what's really going on is that there is a much better chance of being able to verify that all the activity is doing more good than harm.
A priori, it seems quite plausible to me that Sub-Saharan Africans find insecticide-treated bed nets significantly helpful for guarding against malaria, and rather implausible that they find them significantly harmful. You can invent far-fetched stories about how anti-malaria nets are somehow harmful, but you can do the same for soup kitchens.
Apparently, they use them for fishing in some areas, which causes a lot of environmental damage given the insecticide-laden netting. You just can't win.
Wait, are you saying that soup kitchens are ineffective at combating malaria (which goes without saying)? Or are they simply ineffective at the problem they are trying to solve, hunger?
We're obviously Min/Maxing charitable giving. Why would you give to a local soup kitchen where you can see the effects, and even donate time and labor when the cost/benefit ratio is so much less than giving money to far away lands for cheap materials that protect against incredibly deadly diseases, which is obviously a better option?
Or, every one of us could do something different, instead of loading all our eggs in one Red-Cross basket? Sorry. I don't see a reason for this disagreement. Anyone that donates time and/or money to help other people, whether they are on the corner of the street they are standing on right now, or literally thousands of miles away, is a good person in my book.
