I work in development, and am getting an MA in International Development…
Aid effectiveness and transparency is a major topic in this field. There are very smart people who spend their entire lives running rigorous studies trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. A few things make it complicated- it’s a young field and we just haven’t had a lot of time to figure things out, the donor-implementor-beneficiary dynamic is inherently problematic since the people who pay you are not the people you are providing services for, and there is a lot of room for the law of unintended consequences to wreak havoc.
That said, everything more organized than a mom’n’pop charity is going to have a monitoring and evaluation team working with a monitoring and evaluation plan that generally is up to current industry standards. It’s not perfect, but they probably won’t be running out and ruining people’s lives unless something really unexpected happens. For the most part, aid organizations do have a positive impact and do work hard to maximize that positive impact. They aren’t just throwing people a bunch of cows and taking off. That said, you will find infinite debate about any given organization. If you really want to know the exact details of an organization’s philosophy, projects, and how they use money, you’d need to research itself. But I’d say most larger aid organizations do good.
World Vision does a TON of other work besides livestock. I don’t know exactly how they work, but giving individual aid to families in enormously inefficient. I may be wrong, but I imagine most of the donated money goes into community development programs that can help transform the economic situation of the entire community rather than handing out bonuses to individuals. I’m sure their programs are relatively effective. I know people who work there, and they are smart people with specialized education and lots of experience implementing these kinds of programs.
I’m not super-familier with how Heifer Int. implements their projects, but they seem pretty wedded to the “giving individuals livestock” thing. There are some questions in that- it’s certainly a marketable concept to donors…is that why they are sticking to it rather than individually assessing what communities need (which may be wells or schools and not livestock.) If so, does it really matter? After all, a cow and no well is still better than no cow and no well.
Anyway, what you’ve asked is a huge question that people literally get PhD’s in. The short answer, IMHO, is yes, your money probably does good. Yes, there might be someplace out there where it can do any more good. If you care to do the research, you can probably find an organization with a philosophy you explicitly agree with and has published evaluations that impress you. But if you are just wanting to give $20.00 and get the warm fuzzies, I say go ahead and do it the easy way and have fun picturing the fuzzy chicks.