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The national NGOs are of course better known; but if you're willing to do some digging to find them, you're better off giving to local NGOs or local chapters of national NGOs (with earmarks that the $$$ should be spent locally for projects that you deem important). Food banks, homeless shelters, senior centers, nonprofit schools, job training programs, battered women's shelters, suicide prevention, literacy groups, nonprofit youth activities groups, even organizations that support the public parks and libraries.
Outfits like the American Red Cross are big and bureaucratic, with their own agendas, and when you give them $$ for a specific catastrophe, there's no guarantee that it'll go there; it might go to agency overhead. Every few years the Red Cross "reforms," but they go back to their old tricks when the noise subsides. They did it with Katrina. My father and step-father, both WWII vets, shared an abiding hatred of the ARC because they took donations to "help support our boys in battle" and basically did very little for the average dogface (plenty for the officers, though). My stepfather says, "At least the Salvation Army got us hot coffee and donuts!"
Hell, I gave to the Humane Society for Katrina relief, for care of lost or abandoned animals , and it turns out that even they diverted funds to other projects.
Among US-focused national NGOs, Goodwill Industries always has a lot of problems on the local level because of lax oversight. All those donations go into their warehouses and the managers have a lot of leeway to skim the best and divert it to resellers who pay them a kickback. Sometimes the local executive director has been involved.
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