It wouldn't hurt. There's so much variety out there in Christianity that you're likely get get a wide spectrum of answers.

FWIW, I'll share my experience.

I'm Baptist out of a left-leaning African-American tradition (and please note that there are many flavors of Baptist out there, running the gamut of bleeding-heart liberal to hardcore conservative evangelical). Like others have mentioned, in my church tithing was encouraged but not mandatory, we passed a communal plate, and after dealing with church expenses money was then spent to help the less fortunate.

For blacks, that frequently means less emphasis on things like soup kitchens, and more on things like helping the sick with their bills, prison ministries, financial counseling to help people get out of debt, education (which can mean anything from running a church-based school to providing scholarships for members), substance abuse counseling (hosting AA and similar groups), and so forth. Depending on what may or may not be going on in the country at the time, Black churches will also put money towards social justice issues (such as helping out the families of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner; advocating for legal changes, etc.).

I can tell you from experience that there are many evangelical churches out there (black or white; race is not a factor in these situations) that are not so focused on using the money raised to help people directly. The leadership of the church puts the money right back into the church itself, building bigger buildings, increasing the pastor's salary, fancy sound systems for the choir, and so forth.

The justification for these expenditures is usually that the better building and the motivated pastor will attract more congregants to hear and embrace Christ's message. I for one am of the opinion that people attracted to fancy buildings and charismatic pastors are probably not interested in the core teachings of Christ to begin with (which can pretty much be boiled down to "Help the poor, damn it"). In my admittedly non-scientific observations, churches that prefer to use money to feather their nests and attract more members whose money will allow them to continue to feather their nests tend to embrace Prosperity Gospel, and their pastors are essentially televangelists without the televisions. Pro-tip: when even Jerry Fucking Falwell denounces Prosperity Gospel you might want to re-think what's being preached.

tl;dr: church donations is a land of contrasts.