Tired of buying silly last-minute gifts for people who have everything? Give an alternative gift: Make an online contribution to their favorite charity.

A new Web site called Justgive.org can help. It makes the donation and even sends an electronic greeting card notifying the person that a contribution was made in their name, says Kendall Web, founder of the nonprofit site.

"It's unique and meaningful, and it won't end up in the attic," she says.

And Justgive.org isn't just for gifts. Web hopes that holiday gift-givers will use the site to make any donations.

Justgive.org isn't the first site to accept and transfer donations to charities online, but it's one of the few that moves your entire donation directly to the named charity, Web says. It doesn't deduct overhead charges, transfer fees, or credit card fees from the donation, she says.

The site operates through corporate sponsorships and donations. Since its launch in October, corporations have donated nearly $1.5 million, Web says. Companies also donate resources to keep the site staffed and running, while individual businesses pay to sponsor areas of the site, she says.

Making a donation is as simple as making an online purchase. You choose your charity, pick an amount, add it to your basket, and then check out using a credit card.

In addition to trying to make online donations easier, the site is designed to educate people, Web says. Justgive.org offers facts and figures about giving, and calculators to help you decide how much to donate.

Once you've decided on figures, choosing the recipient can be even more confusing. To help, the site offers information on the 640,000 charitable organizations in the United States on file with the Internal Revenue Service, Web says.

If that sounds like a few too many organizations to sift through, Justgive.org has a guide that cuts the list down to 2000 charities. Staffers created the Justgive.org Guide by examining the financial records of the charities, she says. They also considered whether the charity is national in scope and recognition.

Web, who does not take a salary for her chief executive officer position at the organization, wants to encourage you to funnel all your donations through Justgive.org. The site will securely store (and password-protect) records of all your donations, which can be very handy at tax time.

But if you'd rather check out other all-in-one charity sites, or the Web sites of individual charities, you should follow some basic rules of engagement, according to Angelika Geiger, the chief operating officer of Entango, a for-profit company that designs online-donation technologies for charities.

Geiger offers this checklist to help you ensure that your hard-earned contribution is securely and accurately transmitted online.

• Verify that the organization is a charity. "A dot org [domain extension] doesn't necessarily mean they are a legitimate charity," Geiger says. Before you donate, check with sites such as the Better Business Bureau Online, the National Charities Information Bureau, or the American Institute of Philanthropy to find out more about an organization. Also watch out for sites with names that sound similar to those of national organizations.
• Check out a site's privacy policy. "See how they plan to use your name," Geiger says. Some will sell the list of names they collect. A lack of a privacy policy may be a sign, she says, or you can call and ask.
• Verify security is in place. "Use commonsense precautions," she says. It's the same as making an online purchase, so be sure the site has a URL that includes "https" to indicate it's secure, shows a padlock in your browser's status bar, or displays a Verisign logo before you enter your credit card information.
• If it's a shopping site that pledges a portion to charity, find out the specific portion. Most of these sites are legitimate, but some pass very little along to the charity, Geiger says. Most charities would rather you make a donation directly rather than paying an inflated price of which they get a small portion, she says.

Fraud isn't a large issue with online donations yet, Geiger says. The fact is, most charities are just trying to capitalize on the Internet's capability to efficiently bring in contributions, she says. However, not all charities are technology savvy, so it's up to you to protect yourself when you make a donation online.