This is the time of year when we think not only about ourselves and what we would like for Christmas, it’s also the time we think about donating money to charity.

So here’s a little primer on how to be a good donor, how to be a good charity; and what companies should do to make sure they are also supporting good causes. And, most importantly, how to make sure that the charities you support are doing the best they can do with the money they receive. That last one is hard – because sometimes it can be really difficult to separate what a charity says it’s doing with what it is really doing.

Earlier this year, news broke that Oxfam Great Britain aid workers had exploited women in Haiti, that male aid workers had sex with women for money. My own view isn’t that sex work is bad but what’s bad is that these women were also beneficiaries of the aid Oxfam was distributing, so the power relationships were corrupted. It made these women so much more vulnerable at a time of great upheaval.

That revelation didn’t just affect fundraising for the international aid organization in Great Britain. It had a huge impact in Australia too. Australian workers weren’t implicated – but it’s hard for donors to disentangle one Oxfam from another.

In the wake of Haiti, Oxfam went for a cultural overhaul. In Britain, it’s still waiting for the report from the UK Charities Commission. In Australia this week, a report commissioned by the Australian Council for International Development (ACFID) found Australia’s aid organisations have been the subject of 31 substantiated sexual misconduct claims in the past three years. But all the apologies of the aid organisations in the world won’t fix the problem without a complete overhaul.

Oxfam Australia’s CEO Helen Szoke, a former Australian race discrimination commissioner, is honest about what happened here. She says immediately after the Haitians revelations, a significant number of Australians cancelled their regular gifts. Fundraising is still down.

“It made a difficult year even more difficult,” says Szoke.

Oxfam Australia did not lose one single corporate partner. That’s pretty impressive and the exact opposite of what normally happens after a reputational catastrophe. That’s partly because the organisation went straight to them, to be open about how they planned to deal with the revelations – but more importantly, how to fix the underlying culture and that’s a lesson which other charities could learn.

Telstra, for example, used to be a sponsor of White Ribbon but in the middle of the sponsorship period, there were revelations about a connection to gambling and alcohol interests. The sponsorship was not renewed and an insider tells me that revelations “didn’t help” the charity's cause.

White Ribbon denies this was the case and says their relationship with Telstra was only for one year.

Oxfam pretty much set to work straight away trying to clean house. On the surface, providing international aid looks to be the real deal in terms of being good – but what the organisation had to recognise was that in some areas, it just didn’t operate with the kind of culture an international aid organisation should have. It had to rethink how it used its power and influence.

Szoke says that Oxfam has learned a lot from the feminist movement. “It’s brought to the forefront that power relationships are at the heart of this issue.”

And it’s hard for donors to make really good judgments about how charities are using their money. Some have a concrete effect, like Oxfam, where donors can see what’s going on. Other charities, like White Ribbon, have a less tangible impact.

But if it’s hard for us, it’s even harder for companies trying to make good calls about where their money should go. Chair of accountancy at the University of Aberdeen (formerly at QUT) and a lifelong researcher on corporate social responsibility Azizul Islam, says companies must be really careful about what they support and promote. As he says, there are two distinct aspects. One, companies use sponsorships and partnerships as marketing tools. Look! We are doing good! But it’s also a way to demonstrate that the company acts in a socially responsible way.

But when companies choose charities, they need to be careful.

“You have to look at the use of the money and its impact,” he says. On top of all that, companies should have a good long look at the governance of any charity they plan to sponsor. All the reputation-building companies do when they hand their money over won’t come to much when the charity falls apart at the seams.

Islam says companies have their own internal issues and are ill-equipped to respond when those organisations benefitting from ‘corporate social responsibilty’ don’t look like they are all that responsible themselves.

Meanwhile, it’s hard for us to know exactly where we should send our money when we want to donate. What tool can tell us where and how our money will be used? Should it be the one which has the lowest admin costs? Or one clearly aligned with our values?

The answer is to look at the charities and see how they deal in a crisis. Oxfam has complied with the vast majority of ACFID recommendations and is working on the ones which require a sector-wide response.

Then what drives them and how can we see what they do. And only after that should we ask, what drives us to donate? Are we just doing it to feel good or are we doing it to really make a difference.

Jenna Price is an academic at the University of Technology Sydney and a Canberra Times columnist.