Safe Giving - Avoid scams and other rip-offs carried out under the guise of a charitable cause.

If you give money directly to a registered charity they can claim back the tax you paid on the money when you earned it, increasing the value of your donation to their cause.

If you donate to any small charitable fund though a crowdfunding site a proportion of your outlay will be diverted from the cause to the operators of the site. It is unlikely this will be the most efficient method of funding disaster or crisis relief efforts where established charities are already operating with similar aims. Larger operations benefit from economies of scale, reducing costs and maximising the effectiveness of your cash support.
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The regulations being flouted by a surprising number of pop-up independent charitable fundraising campaigns currently surfing the wave of compassion triggered by the recent publication of a photograph are there to protect the donations made to the fund and to ensure they are used properly and only for the purpose for which they were made.

For small charitable public fundraising campaigns the requirements are far from onerous. For successful campaigns that raise in excess of £5000 a year there is a requirement to register as a charity, which is also not onerous and is quite reasonable an expectation to make of any group or individual entrusted with that amount.
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If it is not clear *before* you make your charitable donation exactly whom you are giving your money to, by which I mean such that you could easily identify and locate them if they were to misuse or lose it, consider why they would feel the need to keep this detail secret when the law requires transparency.

Also check it is clear *before* you make your charitable donation to a particular cause what will happen to unspent monies when a campaign is closed. Your money should not, for example, be at risk of loss in the event of the organiser losing interest in the cause or being incapacitated through illness or death and should not be spent on anything you would not wish to contribute to.
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The above advice applies to any charitable giving and is provided free of charge and for the benefit of all. Whether I personally support any cause or not is irrelevant as to whether I wish those who do support that cause to have confidence their cash donation to it is efficiently achieving what they intended it to.

This is about safe giving. It is not about politics.