We’ve been accused many times (including here and here) of trying to take the emotion out of charity. That doesn’t make any sense to me - I can’t think of any reason to do charity other than emotion (call me crazy, but I’ve found that disobeying the Categorical Imperative doesn’t bother me).

It is true that we want to use logic, math, statistics, estimation, judgment, and every other tool at our disposal, to figure out which charities are actually accomplishing the most good, and it is true that we distrust glossy brochures with heart-rending pictures. That must be where the argument comes from: “Imagine,” says the Straw Man, “that you are considering two charities - one which is shown by charts and statistics to save 5 lives per $100, and another that sends you pictures of the 4 adorable, suffering children your $100 will save. Which would you choose?”

Well, Mr. Straw Man, let me put a question to you. Think of someone you deeply love and care about - your child probably works best for this analogy, but it can also be your significant other or just someone who is wikkid cool. Imagine that this person is demonstrating worrisome physical symptoms. Imagine that a doctor sits you down and shows you charts and statistics that suggest to you, strongly, that this person will die unless she takes her prescribed medicine. But the person you love doesn’t agree with the analysis, and doesn’t want to take the medicine. When you ask the person to take it, she gets angry and hostile; when you force her to take it, she cries.

So you’ve got your two pieces of evidence: the crying, suffering, and emotions of the one you love, vs. the dry charts and statistics that show you how to save her life. Which one do you trust? EASY. YOU GET YOUR LOVED ONE TO TAKE THE MEDICINE, EVEN IF IT MEANS CLUBBING HER OVER THE HEAD AND SHOVING IT DOWN HER THROAT. YOU KNOW IT.

It’s when we really care that we find ourselves trusting our brains.

We’ve written a heck of a lot about what “measurements” should and shouldn’t be applied to charitable work - that’s what we spend a lot of our time thinking about, seeing as how we’re trying to figure out where to donate and all. Here’s a roundup of what we think. It’s a long post, but there’s candy for you: we offer up our actual, defined, concrete metrics for you to look at and think about, rather than sticking to abstract thoughts about whether you can quantify philanthropy (as I predict most others will).

First, though, the abstract stuff. Like many others, we are concerned about the point where measurement tries to do too much. Improving people’s lives is complex and difficult; you can never really be sure of what you’re accomplishing; and there are philosophical decisions to be made as well. An overambitious metric risks a conclusion like “Building a new charter school in New York City has a GORP (Good over RePlacement) of 17.3, whereas distributing medication to those with AIDS in Africa has a GORP of 18.5 - I think it’s pretty obvious where to donate, no?” More on this pitfall (which we’ve seen a lot of) here.

We also hate metrics that do too little. I’m constantly amazed at the way people will accept any ranking that someone cares to throw together, regardless of whether it makes any sense whatsoever (see the U.S. News and World Report rankings of just about anything, as well as this flagrant violation of common sense that didn’t so much as give me an honorable mention). The charity version of this is what we call the Straw Ratio, a seductively easy-to-calculate metric that is roughly as helpful in deciding between the best charities as this link is. I’ve written no less than 10 posts on why this metric, featured by Charity Navigator among others, is the worst thing since, uh, unsliced bread.

But to let the matter end there is unacceptable. There are too many options, and there is too much at stake, to throw up our hands, as I argued here. Metrics can’t do everything, but they have too much to offer for us to abandon them. We need to figure out what our goal is in donating, and measure what we can. So, enough generalizations. If we had all the information, the following would be our ultimate measures of charities within each of our seven areas of focus.

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Causes 1-3: aid the poorest of the poor, focusing on Africa.
Cause 1: Provide for basic human needs including basic health care, food, water, and shelter.
Ideal metric: number of people for whom all such basic needs are met, and wouldn’t have been met without the charity’s activities, per dollar per year.
Cause 2: Fight epidemic curable/treatable diseases, including malaria, diarrhea, tuberculosis, AIDS, measles, and pneumonia.
Ideal metric: number of people who are alive and functioning, but would have been killed or debilitated without the charity’s activities, per dollar per year.
Cause 3: Enable economic opportunity through microcredit, job assistance and training, and education.
Ideal metric: number of people whose jobs produce the income necessary to give them and their families a relatively comfortable lifestyle (including health, nourishment, relatively clean and comfortable shelter, and some leisure time), but would have been unemployed or working completely non-sustaining jobs without the charity’s activities, per dollar per year. (Systematic differences in family size would complicate this.)
Causes 4-7: remove barriers to opportunity in wealthy societies, focusing on New York City.
Cause 4: Provide for basic human needs including basic health care, food, and shelter.
Ideal metric: number of people for whom all such basic needs are met, and wouldn’t have been met without the charity’s activities, per dollar per year. Note that this cause remains philosophically distinct from Cause 1, because living like this in the developed world is a fundamentally different experience – and means different things to different donors – relative to living like this in the developing world.
Cause 5: Aid youth development (pre-high school) through after-school activities, child care programs, etc.
Ideal metric: number of children who enter high school with normal levels of learning abilities and mental health, but wouldn’t have without the charity’s activities, per dollar per year.
Cause 6: Improve educational opportunities at the high school level through charter schools, summer schools, and public school reform.
Ideal metric: number of children who graduate from high school well equipped for college (as demonstrated by later college grades), but wouldn’t have done so without this charity’s activities, per dollar per year.
Cause 7: Enable economic opportunity through microcredit, job assistance and training.
Ideal metric: number of people whose jobs produce the income necessary to give them and their families a relatively comfortable lifestyle (including health, nourishment, relatively clean and comfortable shelter, some leisure time, and some room in the budget for luxuries), but would have been unemployed or working completely non-sustaining jobs without the charity’s activities, per dollar per year. (Systematic differences in family size would complicate this.)

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OK. On one hand …

I think these metrics rock. There is a “click” for me when I read them - “Yeah, that’s what I want out of this charity! Yeah, that matches with common sense! That’s right - if Group A and Group B are both doing microfinance, and if it can actually be shown [forget for the moment that it can’t be] that $1000 leads to 3 sustainably employed people through A and only 2 through B, I feel good about donating to A!” This quality in a metric is far from given, and I think the key is making sure that everything is measured in people fully served. We make no attempt to make a conversion factor between someone whose life improves a little and someone whose life improves a lot - that factor would be arbitrary and would lead to numbers that don’t have clear meaning. Instead, when we start having to decide between fundamentally different ways of improving people’s lives, we stop comparing charities. This way, we can measure everything in terms of people, not any abstraction.

And I think it’s cool and useful to have these metrics. They help to focus our thoughts, when we’re trying to evaluate charities, and the fact that they’re well-defined may explain why we tend to have a more detailed idea of what we want than other donors do. We know that when we’re talking to a microfinance organization, it isn’t enough to see $ loaned - we know we need to know how many loans were made, how many were paid back, and (if possible) what ultimately happened to the borrowers; and we know how to weight these things and combine them into a sense of what ultimately got accomplished. So, go us.

On the other hand … we’ll never actually calculate a single one of these things.

Oh, we might estimate them, very, very loosely. We never have yet, because we’ve never even been in the ballpark of enough information and certainty. When we’re looking at public school reform, for example, it’s huge just to see that a program made any impact. Calculating how many lives were changed is a dream.

Once you start actually looking at charities’ specific activities, you find that there are no more generalizations to be made on this topic. We know what we’re aiming for (the metrics above), but what information actually ends up being relevant is completely case-specific. There’s no way to go about it except by combining analysis with judgment, common sense, intuition, and improvisation.

So, we welcome comments on our metrics and we continue to think about them, but we are also wary of hyperfocusing on them. We think that people who hyperfocus on metrics are putting too much faith in numbers and experts. Nobody will ever know for sure how many people they’re helping, and the estimation involves literally hundreds of judgment calls that no degree can qualify anyone to make. That’s why we want to put the focus squarely on blowing up the black box. We seek to be the first people ever - including any advisor or foundation you like - to publicly share everything that goes into our giving decisions. We think that’s the most valuable thing you could ever have in an evaluator.

I’ve done an arguably excessive amount of ranting on what I’ve dubbed the “Straw Ratio”: the idea that we can find the best charities by seeing what percentage of their total expenses goes to program expenses, or, in Straw Man parlance, goes “straight to the people who need it.” It’s about time for me to stop devoting every post to this, but before I do, I want to wrap up with why I’m so obsessed with this issue.

To me, the Straw Ratio is more than a bad metric: it’s an emblem of the biggest single problem with charitable giving today. The problem is the fallacy - specific to charity - that how much you spend is more important than how you spend it. That, in the end, is the fallacy behind the Straw Ratio: that what matters about a donation is not what it pays for, but how much it pays for.

It’s the same problem that sits behind the success of “microcharity” sites such as DonorsChoose and GlobalGiving and Kiva, which I will complain about more later - the attitude that getting your money straight to where it’s needed, bypassing administration and planning, is an exciting and intelligent way to give it.

It’s the same problem that sits behind some of the excessive restriction/designation of donations, both by individuals and foundations, which I will also complain more about later. Too many donors feel that if “someone else” pays for all the planning, evaluating, and administration (or if they simply aren’t paid for at all?), they’ve gotten more bang for their buck.

It might be the same problem that makes charities so reluctant to embrace transparency and admit that not everything they do is perfect - the obvious benefits of global dialogue, in terms of figuring out how to spend money, are offset by a fear that there will be less money to spend.

And in the end, it is probably the same problem that explains why donors are not smart about their giving, and nobody aside from GiveWell seems interested in helping them to become more so. From the (RED) campaign to the “Don’t Almost Give” campaign to, well, everything, “being charitable” is identified with “giving a lot.” The nonprofit sector is naturally obsessed with getting people to give more, and donors think that the only thing that determines how good you are at giving is how wealthy you are. That’s wrong.

The world’s needy don’t just need your dollars, they need your thoughts. If your friend gives more than you but gives it worse, this is pretty much the equivalent of their having a vastly superior tennis racket and being a vastly inferior tennis player. You are better. Why does that make so much sense in every context except charity, but sound so foreign here?

In all, I can think of a whopping two activities where money alone will buy you success. 1. Arcade games (the ones where you can continue as long as you have more quarters). 2. Strip clubs. Nothing else comes to mind.

Money can’t buy you a great movie. Money can’t buy you a great product. Money can’t buy you love. It can’t buy you a better world either.

Anyone who has ever had a job knows that throwing money at a problem is worthless, and that a single great idea can dwarf the impact of a bigger budget. Anyone who has ever watched a tiny startup business take down a Goliath knows the same thing. Anyone who has ever had a hobby knows that how much you spend is going to account for half, at most, of how good you are.

Anyone who has ever had 5 minutes of consciousness knows that intelligent thoughts are gold, and that next to them, money is cheap. So next time you give, expect your donation to help pay for salaries and self-evaluations. And when it comes to choosing where to donate, don’t use the Forbes list or the first slickster who sends you a picture of a baby. Put in some time, and donate some of your own intelligence as well. The world needs it.

If my extended, multi-post rant on the Straw Ratio has been at all convincing to you, you should be concerned about what the Internet thinks “charity evaluation” means. I’m not just talking about the top result, but about the whole shebang.

Give.org’s criteria don’t say a single thing about the nature or effectiveness of a charity’s program activities - only its organizational policies and, of course, our friend the Straw Ratio (see “FINANCES”). The next link is referencing the American Institute of Philanthropy, whose ratings criteria will look familiar to fans of Charity Navigator’s: program expenses good, administrative and fundraising expenses bad, lots of assets/reserves good, content of programs irrelevant. Next one down gives a whole list of links to charity evaluators with more (or less) of the same.

Then you’ve got the bold Put your money where our math is (I’ll admit that’s a great pun), which says “Don’t worry. We’ve done your homework for you,” before laying out criteria for the charities that are “run the most efficiently” - criteria that, again, look mighty familiar, except these guys penalize charities for saving a lot where the above watchdogs reward them. (There are arguments both ways … and both arguments are pretty bad. I haven’t spelled out why I think how much a charity saves is a pretty crazy thing to look at when trying to help people … leave a comment if you want me to.)

And on and on … not to mention the ads for charities claiming to be “Top ranked in efficiency” and the like. One guess as to how they’re measuring that.

Not cool, Internet.

Measuring success at helping people is hard; it has inherent limits; it’s time-consuming; and it’s expensive. But it has to be done.

The first reason is that no matter how much sense an idea makes in your head, translating it to reality is another matter. I’d argue that acceptance of this basic idea is the single reason that we now have medical alternatives to prayer.

The second reason is that there are a a LOT of different charities out there for a donor to choose from - and without some sense of what they’ve actually accomplished, a donor has nothing to go on but theories and brochures. To me, that’s not much better than flinging our money randomly around the globe, with anyone who has a good story and a good accountant getting a chance to play. That isn’t a reasonable approach to solving the world’s problems.

The question of how to evaluate a given charity’s activities is a question for another day. It depends on the charity and it’s pretty much never easy. The question for today is, why isn’t it done more thoroughly and more often? And the answer for today (though it’s only one factor) is that funders don’t want to pay for it.

Children’s Aid Society has explicitly told us they’re concerned about funders’ reactions to the amount of their budget that is going to evaluation, “as opposed to” helping people - and that they’ve been unable to execute a major community school evaluation they’ve mapped out because it exceeds the “evaluation budget” designated in their grants. We asked New Visions for Public Schools why they don’t seem to have had the same problem, and they told us that they have, but that they’ve made a priority of fighting for larger evaluation budgets from their own funders. Over and over again, when we ask charities why they haven’t measured things that seem measurable, they’ve responded that the people who fund them don’t want it: many of their funds are often officially earmarked for non-evaluation purposes, and even when they’re not, they’re concerned about donors’ wishes to “get the money right to the people who need it.”

You and I are lucky that the people who build our bridges, cars, and airplanes don’t decide they can get more money directly to us if they cut their testing budget. The people served by nonprofits should be so lucky.

It’s very unlikely - maybe impossible - that the Straw Ratio bothers you as much as it bothers me. So I’m going to try to spill out all the ranting I have left on this topic over the next few posts, and then we’ll completely be done with it, at least until the next time I tell someone about our project and they go “Oh yeah, I’m really into giving intelligently. Like have you seen these websites that show you how much of your dollar REALLY goes to helping people?”, causing me to completely black out with rage and do things I can’t remember days later, like write incoherent blog posts or light Form 990s on fire. (FYI, this happens about 2x per day on average.)

So. My last post focused on one component of those evil, evil administrative expenses: salaries. Another common administrative expense that jumps to mind (although “administrative expense” is subject to some interpretation, as has been pointed out to me) is information technology. This is something I haven’t seen from the inside, but anecdotes about the generally poor state of nonprofit tech abound. Here’s a pretty good example: Today I Cried, an aborted (as of a few days ago) blog by a nonprofit IT director.

“I think I’m done with nonprofit. I’m looking at corporate - the bigger the better.”

“So much energy wasted on bull[bunnies].”

“Do you know what a modem-router is?”

Oy.

But the most relevant post here is Non-Profit Technology vs. For-Profit Technology. First overarching difference? “Money (restricted/unrestricted funding; discount pricing; used/donated technology; Tech Soup; technology grants)”. What do you know. Those dollars that you’ve so diligently been marking “FOR NEEDY CHILDREN ONLY” made it past that greedy tech department after all.

Ever try to do good work with bad technology?

Is that what you want to be funding?

Whoa, no way - young nonprofit sector workers don’t want to stay in the sector because of low pay? Young people don’t aspire to become nonprofit leaders? Well where are we going to get great leaders? We need great leaders at nonprofits if we want them to get great things done, right?

Man, that’s rough. Anyway, my attention span isn’t so hot, so I forget what I was just talking about, but you know what pisses me off? Charities that blow their money on fat salaries for their greedy executives!! Oh, man. Don’t get me started. At least I have a friend in Charity Navigator, which puts the CEO compensation right on that profile page so I can spot crooks like that Curtis R. Welling. Guy makes 275 THOUSAND DOLLARS (as much as a mid-level investment banker!) for running Americares, which barely cracks the top 20 largest nonprofits in the country. I mean, the AVERAGE nonprofit CEO makes ~$150k/yr - who needs that kind of money? That’s, like, entry-level MBA money!

Listen to me. I want my donation going to needy children, not to some jerk in a suit. I want great leaders in the nonprofit sector. I am confused.

Oh, actually, I think I’ve sorted it out. The problem seems to be that pesky Straw Ratio again, and the mentality that goes along with it: that we should evaluate charities by nitpicking their balance sheets and questioning their operating costs, rather than by looking at what they do and whether it works.

It’s important that everyone involved in a nonprofit’s mission be accountable. We are working to find the organizations that use their resources in the best possible way. You all are hopefully keeping an eye on our work to test the reasoning in our reviews, and to make sure that we are choosing the best organizations for each cause. And watchdogs like our colleague Mr. Straw Man are always checking to make sure that certain line items in the budget don’t get too out of hand.

What about nonprofits’ employees? From my experience starting a national non-profit and working with a number of others, one difference between the nonprofit sector and for-profit sector that has really struck me (and I can only speak for what I’ve seen) is that nonprofits are much worse at doing internal evaluation of personnel, and most of the time it barely happens at all. What does it matter if Bill is not as good as he could be at fundraising, or if Jane is as good as she could be at managing a project, so long as they have their hearts in the right place? That’s what matters: people who share a common goal to make the world better in their cause, and who are willing to work toward that goal, regardless of whether they are necessarily the best at what they are doing…

Go ahead, ask a non-profit that you are considering donating to:

“Hey, when is the last time that you fired someone? Ok, not recently … well, how about a negative review, gave a salary cut as punishment, or put someone on probation?”

In a for-profit enterprise this sort of thing happens constantly, and most would argue that companies are better off because it leads to better employees and a better company. However, I bet that non profit organizations would be shocked if you asked that sort of question as part of a list along with the laundry list of questions related to program and financial management. But it’s the same thing: spending money wisely includes making sure that your employees are as good as they can be, and that is only accomplished through honest and fair evaluation … sometimes that means firing people.

So make sure you’re asking this question. And executive directors, have the heart to fire anyone who isn’t the best person for the job.

We are not health experts, education experts, or social science experts, and we don’t pretend to be. We are donors, working through - and communicating about - the decisions all donors must work through. We do not see our role as designing, managing, improving, or measuring charitable programs; we see our role as understanding these programs as well as non-experts can, with whatever help and testimony from experts is necessary to do so, and sharing our understanding with other non-experts.

We are statistically literate and analytically strong, and we are good at attacking problems with complex and incomplete information; the people who have worked with us in the context of highly competitive and selective environments will attest to that.

But we are not experts. So why should you trust us?

You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t trust anyone to tell you what the best charities are. To a large extent, that’s why our project exists.

When we were trying to figure out where to donate, we had no trouble finding opinions, and recommendations, from experts of many kinds - ranging from foundations to famous economists to watchdogs. Of course, practically every charity we talked to had some form of expert endorsement of their own. The qualifications of these experts are impressive in all kinds of different ways.

But these recommendations didn’t help us. When we were able to scrutinize them, we found reasoning that was sometimes superficial and sometimes just plain didn’t make sense - but the most common problem, by far, was that there was simply no reasoning to be found. These kinds of recommendations don’t cut it, regardless of the resumes that back them.

As I’ve written before (recently), there is no way to evaluate charities with perfect - or even very much - certainty, safety, or precision. This much, the experts can agree on (and they do, from the little we’ve seen - much of it nonpublic - on the development of charity metrics). Intuition, judgment calls, and even philosophy are inextricable parts of every giving decision.

That’s why you can’t trust a person’s conclusion without following their reasoning - no matter who they are. And that’s why expertise in any particular area is so much less important than a commitment to true transparency, and thus to dialogue with anyone in the world - from policy professionals to philosophy Ph.D.’s to ordinary people with great ideas - who cares to participate. GiveWell has already demonstrated that commitment, to a degree we haven’t seen anywhere else.

You can see the criteria we have used so far on our website. Furthermore, all of our reviews should be explicit about why they say everything they say, and where every rating comes from. If you don’t believe they are, we want to hear about it.

There is an understandable desire for universal, “objective” criteria in the nonprofit sector. On one hand, we believe strongly in the value of measuring impact, and in the value of statistical and other analytical tools. Perhaps related to our financial backgrounds, we generally find ourselves much more interested in measurement, metrics, and statistics than the charities we talk to.

On the other hand, the decision of where to donate inherently must be based on both highly incomplete information and on philosophical considerations. A giving decision can always be reasonably criticized and questioned, yet it must always be made. And the few attempts we’ve seen to eliminate all judgment calls, and put all charities in the same terms, have resulted - in our opinion - in absurdities.

The full story of what information we’re going to collect and what metrics we’re aiming to construct is a long one. We are currently writing it up as part of our business plan, and when we’ve expressed ourselves well, we will make it available on our website. For now, our general guiding principles are as follows:

Separate charities into causes. Some goals are too hard to put in the same terms - for example, choosing between improving a New York City public school and providing a clean water source in Africa is something that different donors will feel differently about. It is not realistic, or really even theoretically possible, to collect and process enough information to make everyone agree. Because the choice between these goals has so much philosophy in it, we put the two into different buckets. A “cause” is a set of charities that we feel can reasonably be compared in the same terms - you can see our preliminary list of causes to address here.

Designate the best charities within causes, not between them. Again, the principle is to compare what we can, and let the donor choose where we can’t. It’s not an easy distinction to draw, and we have to balance separating what can’t be compared vs. doing as much meaningful and systematic comparison as possible.

Within causes, design our metrics around the idea of making a significant impact on people’s lives. We will consistently aim to measure success in terms of people, not in terms of income or life-years or anything else. For disease-fighting charities, this means lives saved; for job-creation charities, this means people who go from indigence to self-sufficiency. We are more interested in how many people a charity serves fully and meaningfully than in the theoretical mathematical product of number of people affected times size of effect. Taking this approach also makes our decisions easier for others to understand and form their own opinions on.

Recognize that the metrics we want will not always be attainable. We have already seen how often the information we want is simply not available, as well as how often the interpretation of it is extremely problematic. We are going to have to use judgment and common sense, like any other donor; the difference is that we will promote

TOTAL, EXTREME TRANSPARENCY. We simply can’t stress the importance of this enough. This is what is already unique about GiveWell, and this is the single quality that makes our evaluations more valuable than anyone else’s. Our reviews don’t just say what we concluded; they don’t just laundry-list our resources; they explain every reason that we think what we think. Anyone and everyone has the power to go through our chain of thought, disagree where they disagree, and use our information and hard work to draw their own conclusions. Furthermore, our reviews are open for all the world to see, comment on, criticize, and improve.

There is no easy way to make giving decisions, and there is no giving decision that is ironclad or close to it. This is probably why grantmakers tend not to share what goes into their decisions; it is also precisely why it is so important to do so. With problems involving this much difficulty and judgment, the single most valuable quality of an evaluation is that it be clear. That is our explicit focus, and if we are ever failing in it we want to hear about it.

Note: I am out of time right now, but will answer the third of the current set of questions within the next couple of days.

There are three answers to this. The first is that we eventually want to understand the entire nonprofit sector, because our goal is to do as much good as possible with our dollar. But doing this in the near future is completely impossible (even if we restricted ourselves to charities with budgets of at least $1 million, we’d be looking at over 80,000 organizations in the US alone!)

So we have to narrow our scope - drastically.

The second answer to the question is to say how we chose the organizations currently reviewed on GiveWell.net. Some context is necessary for this. GiveWell began as an informal project, a collaboration between friends who wanted to accomplish more good with our donations. We knew we had to bite off something we could chew, so each of us chose a cause that we were personally interested in, found organizations that focus on it, and started digging for more detail on what they do. Our goal was to find great organizations to donate to, not to be comprehensive, and we reviewed the best organizations we found; the result was the website currently up at GiveWell.net. Our reviews are straightforward about where more information is needed; nothing on this website is, or pretends to be, comprehensive or authoritative.

It was in constructing this website that we determined that the only way to do our project well is through a more concentrated effort. We are going to be far more comprehensive than we were last fall, and far less comprehensive than we hope to be eventually. The third answer to the question is what nonprofits we will seek to review in our first year.

This answer is the most complex, and we haven’t finalized our answer to it. Here’s where we stand now.

We constructed a rough map of all the problems with the world that US-registered charities (which we will be focusing on) address. (Once we make this map intelligible to an outsider, it will be available on our website.) We chose a small subset of these problems with the preliminary aim of (1) helping people who are unfortunate and disadvantaged, but not irrevocably so; (2) translating money directly and reasonably quickly into improving people’s lives, without relying on changing others’ opinions or laws. Our preliminary list of the causes we plan to address is:

Causes 1-3: aid the poorest of the poor, focusing on Africa.
Cause 1 : Provide for basic human needs including basic health care, food, water, and shelter.
Cause 2 : Fight epidemic curable/treatable diseases, including malaria, diarrhea, tuberculosis, AIDS, measles, and pneumonia.
Cause 3 : Enable economic opportunity through microcredit, job assistance and training, and education.
Causes 4-8: remove barriers to opportunity in wealthy societies, focusing on New York City.
Cause 4 : Provide for basic human needs including basic health care, food, and shelter.
Cause 5 : Aid early-childhood development, through child care and programs such as Early Head Start.
Cause 6 : Improve educational opportunities through charter schools, summer schools, after-school activities, and public school reform.
Cause 7 : Enable economic opportunity through microcredit, job assistance and training.
Cause 8 : Protect women from domestic abuse.
Causes 9-10: bring people from extreme suffering to fully enabled lives in one step.
Cause 9 : Facilitate the adoption of disadvantaged children by self-sufficient families, focusing on China.
Cause 10 : Provide full-service boarding schools to the impoverished, focusing on South Africa.

In focusing on certain regions, we are not saying that these are the only regions worth assisting with donations – we are just narrowing our scope so that we can have an attainable goal. We took the existing structure of the nonprofit sector into account, which explains why the regions vary so much in size (most of the charity in New York City is done by organizations focused on New York City, whereas most of the charity in Nigeria is done by organizations with a broad mandate of serving Africa).

Since we aim to serve US donors, we will focus initially on US-registered 501(c)(3) charities with annual expenses of at least $1 million. We want to be able to recommend these charities without fear that they’ll attract donations beyond what they can use effectively.

We will also generally not evaluate other grantmakers (such as private foundations), unless they are providing something concrete (such as consulting services or measurement) along with their evaluations, enough to justify the extra expense and loss of discretion that comes with passing money through another grantmaker.

All of this is preliminary and highly open to discussion.

(As a note to Matt, who asked this question: we are still considering Romania as a possible region of focus along the lines of causes 9-10; this list is the most likely one we will end up with for our first year, but HopeChest’s area is not far from where we’re focusing.)

Beyond Giving asks us several questions on important topics that we’ve talked about a lot but haven’t written about yet. The new “FAQ” subcategory on this blog is for posts that directly answer a common question about our project.

Here are Beyond Giving’s questions:

1) What’s your evidence that you can accomplish your stated goal of analyzing and comparing nonprofits with each other to determine which one’s can most improve the world? What objective criteria will define “the best” nonprofits to support?

3) In developing and employing your rating system, have you consulted with any experts on philanthropy, nonprofit management, fundraising, board governance, outcomes measurement, program evaluation, or any other related field in your project? In other words, what qualifies you to issue ratings of any kind?

There are three important topics here that we haven’t written about, though the topics don’t correspond exactly with the questions. I would say the topics are:

1. Scope - how do we pick organizations to review?

2. Criteria - how do we decide where to give our money and endorsements?

3. Expertise - what qualifies us to do reviews and why should people trust us?

I think that if I address these satisfactorily, I’ll cover Beyond Giving’s questions (Matt, if I’m wrong, just comment on it). So here we go.

I said we would update this blog every Tuesday and Saturday. It says so right over there on the left. Today I am swamped, and I might not be able to give you the Tuesday masterpiece I’m sure you’re addicted to.

I have more pet peeves than anyone else I know, and one of the very biggest ones is what I call flakes: people who say they’ll do something, then back out without giving me the communication I need to adjust my plans. Anyone who’s ever stood me up, or even been very late to something without a heads-up phone call, or just forgotten to do something they knew I was counting on them to do, has felt my wrath … thanks to cellphones and email, there is just no excuse.

So this might be an extremely minor example - I doubt the number of people anxiously refreshing their reader for the latest GiveWell post exceeds 10,000 or so - but if I flaked out, I’d have to punch myself in the face, and I don’t want to do that. Here’s your heads-up. There will be a new blog entry late tonight or tomorrow morning.

You know what I wonder, late at night? I wonder whether if Bill Gates had gone the traditional route and created the Gates Foundation at the very end of his life, the Gates Foundation would have been devoted not primarily to education and health (as it is now), but to promoting computer literacy across the world. I think it could have happened, easily, if he’d been too old or too disengaged to be heavily involved: his philanthropic advisors and consultants could have asked “What does Bill Gates want?” and answered “Computer-related charity, because he was a computer guy.”

By thinking of themselves as “serving” him, they would have failed to do so - because they would have assumed his desires to revolve around “creating a legacy” and “fulfilling his personal values” in a narrow sense.

Instead, the Gates Foundation is just trying to help people as effectively as it can, however that is done. Gates is dealing with health and education because he thinks those are the biggest problems. The goal is broad and simple: make the world a better place. That’s what Bill Gates wants. Why wouldn’t it be?

I’m sure some people see charity as a way to please their vanity or create a legacy first, and a way to improve the world second. But is this as common as the world of nonprofit marketing seems to assume (and arguably, by assuming, to enforce)? The conversations I have about charity - including with wealthy people - invariably assume a common goal of helping people however that is best done. Unlike conversations about food or movies, these conversations really have almost nothing to do with personal (i.e., non-shared) values.

Anecdotally speaking, it seems that foundations whose funders are personally very involved (Omidyar, Skoll, Robin Hood, Google.org) are almost universally broad in their missions. Their mission statements have little to do with their founders’ biographies; instead, they’re just pursuing what they think are the most effective means to helping the world. It’s the foundations with dead or disengaged funders that have the narrow, “personal” missions, trying to improve life for 5′11″ blue-eyed men or whatever. With no evidence, I blame consultants and marketers who tried to “listen to the donor,” when they would have gotten further by listening to themselves.