(MONEY Magazine) – When you give to a charity, you want to make sure that your hard-earned dollars will be used to help the causes that concern you -- the homeless, saving the whales or finding a cure for cancer -- rather than wasted on fashionable fund raisers or lavish perks. To help you determine which organizations are most worthy of your support, we list at right and on the following page the 100 biggest charities in America, ranked according to how much of the money they raised in 1989 (unless otherwise noted) actually went toward good works. Following this criterion, Interchurch Medical Assistance tops the list. We also report on whether the charities meet the standards of the Council of Better Business Bureaus and the National Charities Information Bureau. Bear in mind, however, that numbers alone aren't always a fair measure of a charity's performance. Organizations often have legitimate reasons for spending only what seems like small percentages of their income on programs. For example, as the list shows, ALSAC-St. Jude, a Memphis, Tenn. children's hospital, and the Rotary Foundation spent relatively little on programs last year. The reason: both are accumulating funds for future projects. Other groups, including the Shriners Hospitals, put much of their revenue into endowment funds to pay for services that are provided free to the needy. So if you find that your favorite charity ranks low on our list, ask the group for an explanation before you decide that it's unworthy of your support. Note that the list, prepared from data provided by the NonProfit Times (P.O. Box 408, Hopewell, N.J. 08525; 609-466-4600), a monthly trade publication, excludes the United Way, because its 2,300 local offices raise and spend money as they please, within broad guidelines. As a result, the group doesn't report nationwide audited data.

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