Once upon a time I knew some people who wanted me to help them set up a charity. They were smart enough to know that they could make a lot of money by establishing a not-for-profit organization that would pay them outrageous salaries.

They said that I could be the vice-president of the charity. While I respected their intelligence, I declined their offer. I decided that I wasn't as big a scumbag as they were.

However, they weren't the first scumbags earning big bucks from our charity contributions. The salaries that many heads of charity organizations take home are obscene. And that includes some of our most respected diabetes organizations.

With the economy in turmoil right now we have more reason than ever to weigh carefully who and what we support. But for years one of the questions that people with diabetes ask me often is which diabetes charity deserve their money.

I always start by telling them about potential conflicts of interest. Journalists call this "full disclosure."

During the past dozen years that I have been writing about diabetes, three of these organizations have paid me for articles or consulting. Between 1997 to 2003 I reviewed about 125 diabetes-related Web sites for the American Diabetes Association (ADA). I also wrote an article that the organization's magazine, Diabetes Forecast, published in its March 2000 issue. To date I have also written 25 articles for "Diabetes Wellness News" (formerly "Diabetes Wellness Letter"), the newsletter of the Diabetes Research and Wellness Foundation. In addition, I have consulted to the Joslin Diabetes Center on two contracts.

These are three of the most important diabetes charities. The other top organizations are the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International (JDRF) and the Diabetes Research Institute Foundation.

We have several excellent ways to evaluate these groups. The evaluations all start with the income tax form that they have to file with the federal government. Even though they are exempt from income tax, the government requires that each of these organizations file a Form 990, "Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax."

Fortunately for open disclosure, one website, GuideStar, scans in these forms and puts them online. They do analysis too, but, they charge a premium for the most relevant information that we need to evaluate diabetes charities.

One piece of that information is something that I referred to earlier -- how many of our dollars that the leaders of these organizations take home. Each of us can make a gut decision about how much is too much.

Two other criteria -- which may be even more important -- are the proportion of their budget that they spend on actual programs and services and how much they spend to get the funds they collect.

A different rating organization, the American Institute of Philanthropy, says that it thinks that we can reasonably expect most charities to spend 60 percent or more of what they take in on program services. AIP sets the bar for the cost of fund rasing at 35 percent or less.