I don’t think the “top-down” approach can do the whole job, though, as I explain here.

For instance, poverty maps can show what areas of a big city, or the world, have high degrees of poverty. Overlays to these maps, such as poorly performing schools, or crime/violence incidents, can show other indicators of a need for social benefit organizations.

From this information donors could choose a cause, then pick what country, what state, what city and what neighborhood, they want to have an impact in. Once they do that there are few choices of where they might put their money. Some of these might be great organizations. Some might be not so great. However, rather than start a new organization in the identified area, it might be better to try to help the non profit doing needed work to improve their ability to do that work.

I’m piloting this concept in drawing volunteers and donors to volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in Chicago. You can see examples of maps and a searchable database of programs in the Program Locator on the TutorMentorConnection dot org web site.

Using a map to show all of the places where a problem exists, forces us to think of strategies that would distribute resources to make good social services available in a growing number of these places.

Would this change the way donors approach their business?

We’ve taken the approach of trying to give donors the whole picture - “what you get for your dollar,” with all necessary caveats - rather than just presenting our recommendations. And we’ve had many donors giving to charities that we recommended, even without ranking them 1st in their cause - which to me confirms the importance of giving more than one option and spelling our reasoning rather than just declaring a “winner.” I think this is an important illustration of what GiveWell provides that Gates and other foundations, with their lists of grantees, do not.

We’ve discussed the question of examining nonprofits vs. examining techniques before, but briefly, I don’t believe it’s practical to examine techniques in the abstract, divorced from the specific context and details of their execution. This belief is based largely on our attempt to do so, particularly in the “saving lives” cause - the Disease Control Priorities Project and other sources we consulted don’t have enough information to decide between different approaches in the abstract.

I too would like to see more research that is focused on specific nonprofits, instead of just techniques. However, it’s worth noting that we don’t believe a nonprofit can be assessed in isolation from what it does and what the evidence is that it works (more on this idea at this old post.

I also want to spotlight this phrase of Holden’s:

“subjective/philosophical values that are close to mine”

It seems to me that this is quite important but often overlooked. You can boil things down to metrics, analysis of effectiveness, and so on, but ultimately, there are value judgements to be made, and it’s very difficult to be fully objective about these values. Just to toss out a few, how do we choose among causes that might have disparate effects upon:

1) Mortality now
2) Health now (i.e. conditions not generally fatal)
3) Economic well being now
4) Environment now
5) All of these things in the future (in some cases, there are tradeoffs between current and future impacts)

There are many more I could list. Individuals will have different opinions about these, which is why I think the *process* of charity evaluation is almost as important as any specific set of results. i.e. GiveWell, using its own set of values, might arrive at the conclusion that charities A, L, and Z are the most effective. I might read their analysis, but come to somewhat different conclusions based on my values - perhaps A, B, and Y are the most effective charities in my opinion.

The reason I ask is because I subscribe to PubHub and I really wish that all the foundation research being pushed through that channel was looking at great nonprofits rather than techniques. I would much prefer to read reports on great nonprofits that are working on education than reports that talk about how to fix education.