I think you do have to ask yourself if the need for the charity can outlast its time in the sun.
The Red Cross needs to stay frosty all the time. They get money every time there’s a disaster, but the money to deal with the current disaster needs to have already been spent before the checks clear. If we haven’t had a big disaster in a while, we all know there’s one coming, because they always come, and when that shoe finally drops it might be huge. But donations are down because nothing is blowing up.
We still need Wikipedia even if someone cures cancer. Because you don’t cure cancer, you cure a cancer, the moment you’ve cured two or three, an avalanche of money will arrive to fix the others. Money that might have gone to something else like the Red Cross, WWF, PP, Wikipedia, or really all of the above.
I think they are running a charity on hard mode. If I were feeding homeless people (any year except last year), I have a pretty good idea of what I have to accomplish and for how many people. I could run a pretty lean operation.
Meanwhile RC “has to” stash supplies 12 hours from everywhere in the world and then let most of them rot. Their overheads are huge, even before you get into any discussion of mismanagement.
You can Google to quickly get a bunch of different articles about how ineffective the Red Cross is; we don't need to recapitulate them all here, it's just a little funny that they were your example of an obvious recurring charity donation.
If I have a real point here, it's that people all have different definitions of what important charities are.
The Red Cross needs to stay frosty all the time. They get money every time there’s a disaster, but the money to deal with the current disaster needs to have already been spent before the checks clear. If we haven’t had a big disaster in a while, we all know there’s one coming, because they always come, and when that shoe finally drops it might be huge. But donations are down because nothing is blowing up.
We still need Wikipedia even if someone cures cancer. Because you don’t cure cancer, you cure a cancer, the moment you’ve cured two or three, an avalanche of money will arrive to fix the others. Money that might have gone to something else like the Red Cross, WWF, PP, Wikipedia, or really all of the above.