How We Verify Programs

Last reviewed August 10, 2026 · 99 programs listed, 95 currently accepting

Why we publish this at all

Costume donation is a sector of small, volunteer-run nonprofits. Organizations fold quietly, websites lapse, and a program name keeps circulating on listicles and Pinterest boards for years afterward. We have watched it happen repeatedly while building this directory.

A directory that does not say how it checks its own listings is asking you to take its word for it. This page is the alternative. It is also a standing invitation to hold us to it: if something here is wrong, we would rather hear about it.

The three tiers

A tier answers one question only: how well do we know this listing? It is not a rating of the organization, and it is not a statement about whether they are currently collecting. That is tracked separately, further down.

The flags

Tiers are coarse. Flags carry the specific caveat, and 75 listings currently have at least one.

• No address found. The program operates, but publishes no street address. Common for mail-in and appointment-only programs.
• Facebook only. The organization's only working public presence is a social page. Often means an active program whose website lapsed.
• Seasonal unconfirmed. We believe it runs on a seasonal cycle but could not confirm this year's dates.
• News mention only. Our source is press coverage rather than the organization itself.
• Contact info missing. No reliable way to reach them at the time of review.

What we actually check

Two different levels, and the difference matters enough that we track them separately.

Liveness check

Every listing's website is requested and the response recorded. It catches dead domains, unpublished sites, and pages that have quietly become parking pages. It is cheap enough to run across the whole directory at once, and it is how most failures surface.

A site loading is not verification, so it does not update the review date. Recording a depth of checking that did not happen would make the dates worthless.

Deep review

We open the program's own donation page and confirm what it accepts, how donations are received, the service area, and any seasonal window. Where the organization claims nonprofit status, we check it against IRS records. This is what updates the review date, and it is what we do for a whole category before publishing a guide about it.

18 of 99 listings carry a review date in the current month. The most recent review across the directory was 2026-08-10.

What a deep review has caught

Concretely, because abstract methodology claims are easy to make:

• Programs that had shut down entirely while still appearing active in search results, in one case with the organization's own farewell notice as the only page left standing.
• Programs whose domain had lapsed even though the organization is alive and running, reachable through a social page or a parent nonprofit.
• Programs listed as accepting mail from anywhere that do not take mail at all, because a national chapter network is not the same thing as a mail-in program.
• Programs categorised under a costume type they explicitly refuse, such as a dancewear charity whose published policy excludes costumes.

A pattern worth stating plainly: the problems cluster in exactly the listings a guide would recommend first. Nationwide mail-in programs carry the most storage and shipping burden, so they are the likeliest to fold or to quietly narrow what they take. We check those before anything else.

What we cannot check

Being straight about the limits is part of the point of this page.

• We are not the program. Hours, addresses, and intake windows change without notice. Always confirm before you travel or ship.
• Some sites block automated checks. A server that refuses requests from anything that is not a person in a browser reads to us the same as silence, even though it usually means the site is perfectly healthy.
• Search results are not evidence. Search engines serve confident, detailed summaries of pages that no longer exist. Every closure we have found still had rich search results at the time we found it.
• Nonprofit registration is not a quality judgment. 86 of the 99 listings are registered 501(c)(3) organizations. Registration tells you that donations may be tax deductible. It does not tell you the program is well run, and unregistered community programs are often excellent.
• We cannot see capacity. A program can be entirely real and still be full, paused, or short of volunteers on the week you contact them.

When a program closes

We do not delete it. 4 of 99 listings are currently marked as not accepting donations.

Deleting the page would be the tidier option and the worse one. People search for these organizations by name, and a deleted page sends them back to whichever five-year-old listicle still recommends it. Instead the listing stays at its original address and gains a notice at the top explaining what we found and when. It stops appearing as an option in our guides, and its generated details stop implying it is still collecting.

Where a program has closed but its parent organization is alive, or the charity survives with only a social page, we point the listing at whatever still works and lower the tier to reflect that we are no longer relying on a primary source.

What we exclude, and why

• Donated inventory only. Every listed program distributes costumes free or near-free. Pay-what-you-wish counts. Retail does not.
• No rental businesses and no costume shops. They are useful, but they are not donation programs, and mixing them in would make the directory useless for the question it exists to answer.
• No programmatically generated pages. We do not spin up a page per city or per state from the dataset. Every page here is one somebody wrote.

Telling us something is wrong

This is the part we most want used. If a program has closed, moved, changed what it accepts, or is listed here incorrectly, tell us and we will check it and update the listing with a fresh review date. If you run a program and something on your listing is wrong, that goes to the front of the queue.

Reach us through the contact page. Mentioning the program name and what you saw is enough.