Understanding why you want to make a charitable gift can help you make decisions about the type of gift you want to make and who you want to give it to. Do any of these reasons that people give to charities speak to you?

"Donors invest in organizations because they want to:

• engage in issues that matter deeply to them and to their communities
• seed, encourage, or complete change
• leapfrog tiresome processes or bureaucracies (usually governmental) and get faster results
• give back to the community when their own assets grow
• ensure that others have what they have come to value and perhaps did not have earlier in life
• better their communities through development or enhancement of resources
• guarantee the continuation of ideas and institutions they value
• attain lifelong (and beyond) recognition through the establishment of endowments or the funding of capital projects
• affiliate with others having like values and interests
• be perceived as individuals and organizations who are making a difference, and  enjoy the resulting higher esteem."

Kay Sprinkel Grace and Alan Wendroff, authors of High Impact Philanthropy (Wiley 2001).