(highlight:: Aphorisms like "don't step over dollars to chase pennies" or "penny wise; pound foolish" get at the idea that it doesn't make sense to sweat the small stuff if you're not focused on the big things.
When it comes to creating good in the world, we really need to focus on effectiveness with the big donations. We want to choose the charities listed by GiveWell and Animal Charity Evaluators specifically because they have the capacity to do the evaluations that we, as individuals, cannot.
But when it comes to fuzzies — when it comes to giving to local charities — it's just not as important to focus on effectiveness. Who cares if local charity A is 10% more effective than local charity B? They're both wildly ineffective anyway, so relative effectiveness just doesn't matter here. Ten percent of a small number is a small number. The reason you're giving to local charity A or B has nothing to do with effectiveness, so effectiveness shouldn't enter into the calculation.
So long as you are indeed focused on effectiveness with the donations that actually go toward saving the world, what you do with your remaining money should be dominated by other factors. I give to local charities when a friend asks me to sponsor their charity run — but I do it to be charitable, to support my friend, and to maintain good relations. I don't do it to be effective, and I'm not even going to bother checking how that charity spends their money. When I walk down the street and pass by homeless people begging for a dollar or two, I oblige them — not because it is effective, but because it makes me feel good to help a fellow person with a small amount of my spending money.
None of these fuzzies come out of my Giving What We Can pledge. My actual donations go toward highly effective charities. But just as it is okay to buy the latest video game for yourself or to go to on that much-looked-forward-to vacation, it's also okay to spend a bit of money helping out local charities. When you do so, I wouldn't worry at all about how effective they are. You're not donating to them because they are effective — you're doing it for other reasons, so use those other reasons to determine which ones you give to. Just go for it!
(You specifically mentioned food banks. When giving to them, make sure to donate cash, not canned foods like many people do. Money goes much further to food banks than in-kind donations ever do.))
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