Where Does Your Gift Go?

For so long, giving to charity was an act of blind faith. Then came the Internet and Arthur "Buzz" Schmidt to help givers see whether their money was being well spent. When Schmidt left the private sector a decade ago to raise money for an international development agency, he was stunned by how little number crunching potential donors could do. So he struck out on his own, borrowing 50 shoe boxes of microfilm from the National Center for Charitable Statistics, and in 1996 began posting the financial data of nonprofit organizations on the Web. Three years later, the former agribusiness executive...