This is a guest post from Vipul Naik about how he decided what charity to support for his most recent donation. We requested this post along the lines of earlier posts by Eric Friedman, Jason Fehr, Ian Turner, and Dario Amodei. Note that this post was written before we published our most recent update on VillageReach.

Early giving: small amounts, based on whims

In September 2007, I joined the University of Chicago for graduate study in mathematics. For the first time, I was drawing a regular stipend that significantly exceeded my financial needs. I could now consider donating parts of my "own" money. Initially, I neither had a strong sense of what I should donate to, nor a burning desire to donate large parts of my savings, though I did have a vague feeling that donating money for worthwhile causes was a nice thing.

My initial "donations" made around December 2007 weren't really donations — they were more gratitude payments to non-profits and organizations that I think have made the world a better place — such as a $100 donation to the Wikimedia Foundation (the non-profit behind Wikipedia). I didn't consider myself a philanthropist trying to achieve specific large-scale change through my giving. Also, my savings weren't very high, and I hadn't mentally adjusted to the concept of making large donations.

Sponsor a kid!

I liked the idea of donating to organizations that serve poor people. However, I wasn't aware of any organization that I considered reliable, and finding one wasn't a priority. In June 2008, I was in downtown Chicago running some errands when I came across street fundraisers advertising for Children International (GiveWell review here), a Kansas-based international NGO that serves children across many developing countries through a one-on-one child sponsorship model. The idea appealed to me (my parents had participated in child sponsorship programs in India). I investigated Children International's website, and three weeks later (July 2008), I decided to sponsor a child for $22/month. A month later, I upped the number of children to two, for $44/month. I continued increasing the number of sponsored children until, around August 2009, the number had increased to 15 kids for $330/month.

Some neat — and life-changing — logic

I read a chapter in Steven Landsburg's book More Sex Is Safer Sex (an expansion of this Slate article) where Landsburg asserted that one should donate to only one charity rather than split one's donations across multiple charities. Landsburg argued that the size of a donation is usually too small to affect the relative merits of different charitable causes — and hence if you chose to give your first $1000 to Charity A rather than Charity B, the same reasoning should continue to apply to your next $1000. "Small" charities are somewhat different, if a donation has sufficient impact on the charity’s activities such that the donation, itself, alters the relative merits of different charities. However, for much of impersonal charitable giving to large causes/organizations, Landsburg's reasoning (and the accompanying mathematics) seemed valid, and I was convinced. (GiveWell has a similar philosophy — see this blog post on triage).

Landsburg's "one charity argument," on the surface, was more reason to keep donating to Children International and simply adjust the quantity donated rather than donating extra money to other charities. Or so I thought. But I gradually realized that the argument isn't merely about donating to one charity, rather, it is about donating to the best charity. I had no reason to suspect that Children International was bad, but I had no basis to conclude that they were the best (or anywhere near). Why did I continue donating to them?

Children International's sponsorship model (as opposed to simply making one-off grants/donations) made it psychologically hard for me to stop donating to them. At the time, I had no idea of candidates for substantially better charities. In hindsight, I should have stopped donating to Children International much earlier, even before I'd found a good charity.

Cutting the sponsorship cord

In late December 2009, I discovered a Bloggingheads diavlog (conversation) between William Easterly and Peter Singer. I'd already read Easterly's books The White Man's Burden and The Elusive Quest For Growth, and I also followed the Aid Watch blog to which he was a primary contributor. I was thus aware of Easterly's work and views on the shortcomings of official aid and development assistance. Peter Singer, a Princeton bioethicist and advocate of greater giving to meet the needs of the world's poorest, was new to me. In the diavlog, Singer mentioned GiveWell, and I followed the link to their website. GiveWell's research and philosophy impressed me. GiveWell did not recommend Children International, but recommended a handful of organizations based on extensive analysis. I wasn't sold on GiveWell's recommendations, but I now had some serious candidates that seemed substantially better than Children International.

I asked Children International to end my sponsorship in February 2010. I decided to not use a regular monthly donation model any more (with its implicit feeling of lock-in) but rather make periodic donation decisions, with due diligence done each time. I wasn't sure of the period: a long period has the advantage that the donation amount is sufficiently large to undertake a more thorough investigation, but this is also a disadvantage. Shorter periods between donations and smaller donation quantities reduce the risk of making a large donation to an organization that shuts down, or closes its room for more funding gap, shortly after I donate.

Discovering VillageReach

I continued to follow GiveWell as well as other blogs on philanthropy, aid, poverty, and development. I was reasonably convinced that low-income country health systems was low-hanging fruit for donor money. The approach of GiveWell's top charity VillageReach (GiveWell review here) impressed me. I made donations of $1250 in March 2010 and $2000 in June 2010 to VillageReach through GiveWell's website.

Around this time, I started feeling that the one charity argument had exceptions. In some cases, I thought, making a donation tied to specific single projects can actually get those single projects done. Around August 2010, I got in touch with a researcher and talked about partially funding some research related to low-cost private education in the developing world. We had extensive correspondence and phone conversations and in September 2010, I made a donation covering part of the costs of a new research project, with the understanding that any cost overruns would be covered by him. The project was successful (albeit with cost overruns) though the research report is not yet published, so I cannot share details right now. I think this was a case where my willingness to come forward with initial money helped accelerate a project that may otherwise either not have happened or happened a year later.

However, such opportunities are rare and inherently risky. In October 2010, I returned to considering VillageReach for my next donation. I talked over the phone with Holden of GiveWell. I shared some concerns:

• Did GiveWell have a sufficient incentive to critically re-evaluate their own top-rated charities in light of new data?

• Why was there very little other information or news coverage about VillageReach other than their own website and GiveWell's evaluation of them?

• Why hadn't any major donor or foundation agreed to cover VillageReach's funding gap?

Holden addressed my questions, and, shortly thereafter, GiveWell elaborated further in the blog posts Health system strengthening + sustainability + accountability and After "Extraordinary and Unorthodox" comes the Valley of Death.

In December 2010, I made a donation of $5100 to VillageReach, my largest to the organization, bringing my total to-date donations to VillageReach at $8350. After donating, I talked over the phone with VillageReach employee John Beale about VillageReach's activities, to help me in future donation decisions.

A new year

I planned to make my next donation around April 2011. GiveWell published an update on VillageReach in March 2011. The good news: GiveWell found no reason, based on VillageReach's latest activities, to modify its analysis of VillageReach's cost-effectiveness. However, the evidence at this stage wasn't sufficiently clear to conclude definitively that VillageReach's current programs would be as successful as (or more successful than) the pilot programs on which GiveWell had based its analysis.

GiveWell's recommendation was responsible for about $1.1 million of roughly $2 million that VillageReach raised in 2010. VillageReach had originally projected a need for slightly under $6 million for their Mozambique project that was to continue till 2014. They seemed to be on track to meet their funding needs. I was now unsure of the value of my marginal donation. I would still have reason to donate to VillageReach if either:

1. They could deliver demonstrably greater benefits by rolling out their program much more quickly, and they could do so by getting funding more quickly.

2. GiveWell could identify other top charities so that, once VillageReach's funding gap was closed, other donors could donate instead to these other top charities.

I talked again with VillageReach's John Beale in March 2011, and although I continued to be convinced about VillageReach's effectiveness, I was unconvinced about (1). The key hope was now (2) — could GiveWell identify more top charities soon? GiveWell had already identified finding top charities as their top priority for 2011 (see here and here). However, by end April 2011, I wasn't convinced that they'd be successful. Thus, I decided to hold off my donation.

Independently, I started investigating other forms of philanthropy (such as those covered at the Breakthrough Philanthropy conference). I find some of them promising but don't yet feel confident to make a large donation to any of those organizations. In the mean time, I continue to check out GiveWell's updates on VillageReach and on their search for new top charities.

This is a guest post from Eric Friedman about how he decided what charity to support for his most recent donation. We requested this post along the lines of earlier posts by Jason Fehr, Ian Turner and Dario Amodei.

In 2003, I decided that I wanted to increase the amount of money I gave away, shortly after a two-week trip to India. It was there that I saw a level of poverty beyond the scope of anything I had ever seen in America, and I privately vowed that I could not stand by idly.

When I returned home to Chicago, I tried to figure out the most effective way to give and the best organizations to support. Before my trip to India, I had made a few $100-$200 gifts that I later regretted, and this time around I was not going to give away a dime until I was convinced that my donation would be used well. Unfortunately, I was not able to find the information I needed to be comfortable making a donation. Despite the promise I had made to myself, I gave nothing.

Fast forward a year, and the big tsunami hit east Asia in December 2004. The images on tv motivated me to give $1,000 to an organization well-known for disaster relief, and that reminded me that I had not done what I planned on doing after returning from India. Although I restarted my research to find an organization I wanted to give more to, I couldn’t figure out which organizations were strong. Everything seemed like fluff, and there was no “Consumer Reports” for nonprofits. I barely gave anything in 2005.

By 2006, I came to realize that there wasn’t much high-quality information on which nonprofits performed best, so if I wanted to give, I’d have to make do without it. Inaction was unacceptable, so I developed a plan. I started with the American Institute of Philanthropy, which rates organizations on financial efficiency metrics such as percentage of costs that go towards fundraising and overhead. This provided a starting point to identify organizations that might be good, then I reviewed their websites to pick three that I liked. I knew that this was not a particularly rigorous screen, but it was the best I knew how to do at the time. In 2006, I gave $2,500 to CARE, $2,500 to Africare, and $1,000 to Freedom from Hunger.

I figured that donations of this size might draw enough attention to have a serious discussion with their staff. I spoke with each organization, but was unsatisfied with all of the conversations. Whenever I asked them about how to provide the most help for people or evaluate them against other organizations, their responses were inadequate. They were filled with anecdotes about individuals they’ve helped and inspirational stories, but not much information that would genuinely help answer my questions. I was quite surprised when some of them actually asked what I liked most among their set of programs (e.g. education, clean water, healthcare, emergency relief, etc). Weren’t they supposed to be more knowledgeable than me about which of these is most effective?

I asked if other donors asked these types of questions, and they said that it was rare. I asked if big, sophisticated foundations ask these types of questions. They didn’t either. I found that to be exceptionally odd. (Ed note: this was similar to GiveWell staff’s experience before starting GiveWell. See Elie’s blog post from February 2007) (Since then, I’ve asked several different nonprofits about the grant-making process and post-grant relationships they have with big foundations, and there appears to be a surprisingly small amount of value-added in the process. In some cases, the foundations are actually requiring the nonprofits to spend the grants on things the nonprofits don’t think will best help the intended recipients.)

I also spoke with a couple of philanthropy consultants, who I expected to be better at evaluating organizations and selecting priorities. I was disappointed. Usually they would turn the question on me and ask what types of programs and organizations interested me. I explained that I wanted to support programs that were most effective at helping people and organizations that were best at executing those programs, and I was looking for information on how to do that. Other than that, I didn’t really care what type of program or organization it was. While that seemed relatively basic to me, it appeared as if I was speaking a different language. One told me that I needed to figure out what my objectives were, though I thought I had stated them clearly. A couple were somewhat condescending—implying that they were the experts and I was the one who needed help. Their responses to my questions didn’t give me much confidence in their expertise. I wondered if I was the only donor trying to structure my giving around what the world needed rather than my personal interests. (Ed note: for more, see this Tactical Philanthropy post on the rarity of issue agnostic giving.)

Maybe I was being too critical. I knew that I wasn’t asking easy questions, but they also didn’t seem unfair. I wasn’t expecting an objectively perfect answer, but just something better than I got.

A turning point happened a few weeks later. My contact at Freedom from Hunger called me to see if I wanted to meet their CEO, who was going to be in my hometown for a conference. We had a great discussion for about an hour and a half in a hotel lobby, and it became clear to me that he understood what I was trying to do and thought about many of the same issues when running Freedom from Hunger. While I still didn’t know how to evaluate the quality of programs at different organizations, I found one that had shared many aspects of my philosophy. In 2007, I donated $25,000.

Based on the information I had at the time, there was no organization I believed in more than Freedom from Hunger.

In early 2007, my life took a turn for the better: I met the woman who is now my wife. In 2008, Freedom from Hunger offered us the opportunity to join them (at our expense) on a site visit to some of their programs in Ghana. During our time there, we spent a significant amount of time with some of their senior staff (including the CEO), three board members, program staff, and their clients. We saw the programs in action, which increased our conviction in what they do.

We gave another $28,000 to Freedom from Hunger in 2008.

I started following GiveWell in 2009. It was clear from their blog that we shared similar values, and I loved what they were trying to do. But I disagreed with some aspects of their approach. Their emphasis on measurement seemed excessive. This approach had a built-in bias towards smaller, single-program organizations that could measure their impact more precisely. I wasn’t convinced that there weren’t economies of scale in international development. And their focus on scaling up existing solutions and excluding funding unproven innovations seemed incomplete. While I liked what they were doing, I still had more conviction in my own ability to pick organizations.

We gave Freedom from Hunger another $27,000 in 2009.

As I continued to follow GiveWell’s blog in 2010, I became more persuaded toward their views on areas where I previously disagreed. There were still differences of opinion, but I was also coming to realize that their skill in selecting organizations far exceeded mine. It was humbling to realize that someone else is better at something I had put so much thought into.

At that time, GiveWell had not evaluated Freedom from Hunger. For the first time in several years, I wasn’t sure where to donate to. I had a very candid conversation with Freedom from Hunger about this predicament, and they offered to have GiveWell evaluate them. GiveWell was also willing to do the evaluation—they already wanted to learn more about Freedom from Hunger independent of me.

The evaluation resulted in a “notable” rating, which is better than the vast majority of the organizations GiveWell considers, but also not nearly as strong as Gold.

My wife and I liked the people at Freedom from Hunger and had become personally connected with them, especially with the site visit to Ghana. They are extraordinary people who have devoted their lives to helping others, and they are really good at what they do. They might be the best at their specific niche in the nonprofit world. Despite this, GiveWell’s review suggested that there might be organizations in different niches that have a greater possibility of generating results. If helping others was a sport, Freedom from Hunger is good enough to qualify for the Olympics, but it didn’t win the Gold.

My wife and I had several conversations about what to do. Freedom from Hunger did nothing wrong and we had no regrets about our prior donations. They were our friends, and we had enough of a relationship with them that if we shifted our donations elsewhere, we’d have to explain why.

Eventually, we decided that there was one fundamental principle we should apply: giving was primarily about helping the less fortunate, not our friendships or personal interests. Breaking up with Freedom from Hunger would be hard. I explained our reasoning and they took it in stride, demonstrating that they care more about the less fortunate than their own institutional growth. They are a good group. But in 2010, we gave about $31,000 to GiveWell’s donor advised fund to ultimately be distributed as they recommended.

I imagine that there are other donors who read this blog, but donate to many organizations that are not recommended by GiveWell. While I don’t want to oversimplify the decision-making involved with large charitable gifts or pretend that I have all the answers, I will offer two pieces of advice.

First, know what you’re trying to do. I’ve heard many people say that philanthropy is very personal. I understand that view, and my own giving is close to my heart. But if giving is primarily about helping others, then that the most important component of giving should be about other people. That is, the donor’s personal friendships, interests, and passions should take a back seat. Although you may feel a close connection to a school you attended, an illness that affected a family member, or a community you live in, those may not be the areas positioned to provide the most help for others. Instead, donors primarily focused on helping others should identify the greatest areas of need and the most effective solutions. It can be tough to put other people’s needs over ours, but, ironically, it makes most donors feel better about giving in the end. I certainly do.

Second, know when someone else has more expertise than you. I originally viewed Freedom from Hunger as the best organization I could identify based on the information available to me at the time. And I had thought about it a lot. So it was personally challenging for me to acknowledge that GiveWell is better at evaluating charitable organizations. Neither my wife nor I agree with every aspect of GiveWell’s philosophy and approach—I doubt there is anyone who does—but the strengths they have seemed more than enough to outweigh any weaknesses we perceived. There is a certain pride of ownership many donors (including me) have as they develop their own philanthropic paths, and I’d encourage them to critically self-evaluate to make sure pride of ownership doesn’t get in the way of incorporating the expertise of others.

I am extremely appreciative for the work GiveWell has done to provide resources that were not available at the time I started giving. I get more personal satisfaction from knowing that my giving is doing more to help others, and I will have fewer reservations about opening my wallet wider in the future. To be completely frank, one thing that confuses me is why foundations and mega-donors making million-plus dollar gifts apparently make little use of GiveWell. I hope and expect this to change over time.

This is a guest post from Jason Fehr about how he decided what charity to support for his most recent donation. We requested this post along the lines of earlier posts by Ian Turner and Dario Amodei.

Before proceeding, I’d like to thank Dario Amodei and Ian Turner for their excellent guest posts earlier this year regarding their own decision making. I stumbled upon GiveWell in early 2010, as part of a lifelong search for the optimal way to benefit humanity. I’ve been so impressed with the rigor of their logic and the quality of their research that I’ve decided to make GiveWell my primary resource to guide all my charitable giving. Rather than simply rehash what has already been eloquently stated by the staff and friends of GiveWell, I’d like to take a step back and explain a bit of the philosophy that led me to my current state of mind regarding charity.

Whenever I pose the fundamental question of what general life objectives one should have, i.e. what metric to use to determine whether a life has been well lived, I always come back to the same two basic goals: first, to enjoy one’s own life to the fullest, and second, to improve the human condition as much as possible given one’s means and talents. This may seem trite to the subset of people likely to be reading this post, but I think it’s worth stating up front. Some people are motivated by money, fame, power, etc., but I’m writing the rest of this post under the assumption that the “goal” here is to try to use the time and resources we have to make a positive impact on the world.

How do you measure how much good an individual has done? This can be very difficult when you’re dealing with intangibles and vastly differing commodities: how do you compare the impact of Mozart with that of Einstein? Which provides more good: an art gallery or a soup kitchen? So, I decided that impact can be broken down into two categories: elimination of negatives (reduction in death/suffering), and introduction of positives (providing entertainment, emotional fulfillment, etc.). I thought that the first was far easier to measure, less ambiguous, and more universal: only a small sliver of the population might appreciate a beautiful work of art, but I think it’s safe to say just about everyone would prefer not to die or lose their loved ones prematurely, or to feel great pain. For these reasons, I decided to make the elimination of death and suffering the focus of my efforts.

I settled on a straightforward equation by which I would measure my impact: how many people will live healthy, normal lives because I was here who would have suffered or died had I not been here? For most people, this number is probably zero. This is not a criticism; it’s hard to find opportunities to save a life within the realm of most professions. Most people will never encounter a situation where they alone are in a position to save a drowning person or pull someone from a burning building. Additionally, I don’t count a life having been saved if the person who would have replaced you would have done the same thing. For example, I don’t consider a paramedic to be saving several lives a day just because the victims would have died without help. Had that paramedic decided to become a brush salesman instead of a paramedic, a different paramedic would have taken that job and driven the ambulance that day.

So, I consider a life saved/suffering averted only if you achieved something that would not have been achieved had you been replaced by the average person in that position. Using the paramedic example above, let’s say a victim has been shot in the face, and the average paramedic would not have been able to get him to the hospital alive. But, luckily for our victim, today an especially skilled paramedic is on duty; this paramedic has skills that the average paramedic does not, which allows him to get our victim to the hospital safely for definitive treatment. By my calculus, this paramedic has just saved a life.

I work as an anesthesiologist, and I (like most physicians I’m sure) am constantly learning and self-evaluating to ensure I am always providing optimal care for the patients. However, in any profession, there will always be individuals who are more skilled than others. I keep a mental tally of the patients that (in my estimation) are alive and well who would have suffered unnecessarily or died had I been replaced by a less well-trained anesthesiologist. In the three and a half years since I began practice, I think my number is up to about eight, or around one every six months. This mentality also constantly motivates me to be the best practitioner I can be; if I’m not doing a better job than the guy who would have replaced me had I not been there, I need to push myself to be better!

Now turning to giving, I tried to apply the same moral calculus to the world of philanthropy: if I can make a small difference by doing my job well (better than the person I might be replacing), I can make a huge difference by providing something via charity that otherwise wouldn’t have been provided at all. In other words, I think people can make a much bigger difference through careful charitable contributions than they ever can in their everyday lives, virtually no matter what their professions may be.

I wanted to be as sure as possible that any gift I made was being used optimally to improve the human condition. For the reasons I stated earlier, I’ve always tended to gravitate towards charities that aim to reduce suffering and death. Although I didn’t have the means to make a substantial donation until recently, I had been trying for years to determine how to optimally give money to make as great a difference as possible. It seemed that there simply was no consensus of expert opinion; I remember an article in Slate from 2006 in which they asked various writers and academics to whom they would donate a million dollars if they had the chance (there was very little overlap in their answers.)

Since I have a medical background as well as some experience working in the third world, I came to suspect that the lowest hanging fruits would most likely be in nations with the fewest resources. Examples seemed too numerous to count; in school I heard lectures by physicians who had worked in India or Africa, where children would die of diarrhea for want of a simple electrolyte solution, where hospitals would reuse needles since they didn’t have enough disposables, where children were still dying of measles and other vaccine-preventable illnesses (it doesn’t get much more preventable than measles!) It seemed that even a few dollars put into the right hands in the right way could save a life.

When I was young, I was convinced that Africa remained poor because the first world just didn’t care about them. Over the past several years, however, after reading (among others) popular books by economists William Easterly and Paul Collier, I’ve learned that tremendous resources have already been invested in third world development, frequently with little or nothing to show for it. While Easterly has a very cynical viewpoint (he essentially believes that foreign aid has never facilitated third world development), Collier feels that it’s more a matter of certain interventions being effective and others ineffective. I still have an unfinished email in my Gmail account from a year ago that I was composing to Collier asking him where he thought my charity dollars would do the most good. Before I had the chance to send it, I stumbled upon GiveWell.

I promised myself long ago that I would never give to charity just to assuage feelings of guilt or to help convince myself that I wasn’t being selfish walking past homeless people to buy $4 cups of coffee. I had looked into several possibilities prior to finding GiveWell (the Gates Foundation, Africare, disaster relief) but simply wasn’t satisfied with these choices for a number of reasons. In fact, it seemed to me that virtually every cause had a chorus of detractors claiming that the cause was doing more harm than good. I decided to wait and research this further before giving; I actually made no donations at all until 2010 when I found GiveWell.

I actually found GiveWell by accident while searching for more research by the economists I mentioned earlier. As I read through GiveWell the first time, I realized that I had found kindred spirits in philanthropy: the staff of GiveWell started with all the same frustrations that I had felt over the years, but they had found some success in seeking out the answers. I was very excited to read through GiveWell’s philosophy and mission; it seemed that, finally, someone was saying exactly what needed to be said. I looked through their research with my usual skeptical eye, trying to find some fatal flaw in reasoning and analysis. As I read further, I found that every issue that needed to be addressed had already been addressed and evaluated thoroughly.

At this point, I found the analysis on VillageReach, currently GiveWell’s #1 recommended charity. It seemed VillageReach’s approach was having a well-documented impact that was extraordinarily cost-effective. For the first time in my life, I felt comfortable enough with an organization to make regular substantial donations. I have continued to do so over the past year on a monthly basis (I elected to make a recurring monthly donation rather than a single annual donation; this approach allows myself greater flexibility in case new data were to suddenly become available that would cause me to change charities.)

In my own mind, I add the lives saved as a result of my support of Villagereach to my personal total. Although I agree completely with GiveWell that attempting to quantify the cost per life saved requires many assumptions and is at best a rough estimate, I find it exciting to think about the sheer numbers one person can save with precisely the right donation. I’ve started with regular donations of $1000/month. Using GiveWell’s estimate of $545 per life saved by VillageReach, this would be one child death averted every two weeks solely attributable to my contribution (remember, as a comparison, I would estimate that I am “saving” at best one person every six months through my work!) Although it’s impossible to ever have a guarantee in the world of charity, this is the most confident I have ever been. I intend to continue to use GiveWell to guide my giving, and I thank the GiveWell staff for providing me with the tools I need to make an informed choice.

All my life, I had been looking for “the answer”, the low-hanging fruit: if we have so many capable, talented individuals with the means and desire to improve the human condition, why does progress seem so slow in so many sectors throughout the world? I do believe that the answer may simply be misallocation of resources, often despite the best of intentions. What if we could redirect all charitable efforts towards the interventions that actually work, and stop wasting resources on the ineffective ones? What if we could change the culture of the nonprofit sector from one of competition for fundraising to one of competition for the most effective solutions? This, to me, may be the start of a revolution in the world of charity, the start of a movement that changes everything. I, for one, am thrilled to be a part of it.

This is a guest post from Ian Turner about how he decided what charity to support for his most recent donation. Ian and GiveWell staff had several in-depth conversations as he worked through his decision, so we invited him to share his thought process here. Note that GiveWell has made minor editing suggestions for this post (though Ian determined the final content).

Every person who gives to charity does so for a different reason, and these reasons are as numerous and as varied as the thousands of causes and millions of charities that pursue them. I’d like to share a little about recent choices I’ve made, and how that approach to giving has developed over time.

For me, the essence of giving comes down to three distinct beliefs or realizations. These are, in turn, the limitations of money; the importance of money; and an actual desire to help others. When you combine these three beliefs with actual resources to give, one inevitably must give and must give for impact - that is, one must give well. Thus my approach. I’m not attached to any particular sector, cause, approach, country, or region. But I do look to maximize the effect of my gifts on the human condition overall.

First gifts: A rough start

In the very beginning, as a child, my father greatly influenced my thoughts about giving. He placed ideas in my head such as “don’t give to panhandlers directly, give to organizations”, and created the legitimacy, if not the expectation, of giving freely. Out of this idea, the desire to help now (and not in the unpredictable future), and out of the tradition of tithing shared by many religions, I decided even before I ever had any real earnings that I would give 10% of income (after taxes) to charity, on an ongoing basis. That is a practice that I have continued in the over a decade since.

I had no idea at the time how hard aid actually is, how unsubstantiated most of the nonprofit sector is, or how hard it is to find an effective organization to give to. My first gift was in September 1999, in the amount of $650 (10% of the income from my first summer job) to an organization picked more or less at random: The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC). I didn’t have a clear objective other than improving the human condition generally, for which their mission seemed broad enough, and the only real thing that set them apart is that they made the right ask at the right time.

I was disappointed to receive, over the following year, a variety of communications from the UUSC, indicating that my money was being spent in all kinds of ways that (to me) didn’t make sense, from US political activism to questionable (to me) small-scale village business projects. I resolved that I would do a little better next time.

So the next year, after another (more profitable) summer job, I made a different gift. At the time I figured world hunger was a bigger problem than fair trade for cocoa farmers, but thanks to seeds planted by my father I figured there was a better way to tackle hunger than just handing out food. And that’s how I found Freedom from Hunger. Freedom from Hunger operates a large variety of international programs, the centerpiece of which claims to combine microcredit and education for poor rural women.

To evaluate the organization, my main source of information was annual reports. I went back a few years, but didn’t look at any studies or third-party information. Even with this little information or experience, however, I could tell that there were some differences between organizations and looked at a few different ones. Freedom from Hunger had what seemed to be the most impressive annual reports, which I think means intelligent copy that told a story which seemed reasonable, at least from my naïve perspective. So in 2000 I gave them $2,500.

As an exercise, I recently revisited Freedom from Hunger using my now more experienced perspective, to see what evidence of impact they really had. The answer could be described as more than most, and less than the best. Freedom from Hunger did perform a number of controlled studies examining different aspects of its flagship programs, but the results seem questionable, prone to cherry-picking, and it’s not clear to what degree the evaluated treatments match the programs actually implemented worldwide. Freedom from Hunger’s programs today are also significantly more complex than they were in 2000.

One of the biggest lessons I learned from the 2000 gift is that giving well is hard, harder than I ever would have guessed two years previous. I decided I could manage the process better if I made larger gifts less frequently. Eventually, I settled on keeping 10% of my income in a special account each year and then only actually giving it away triennially. As it turns out, I didn’t have any significant income again until 2004, and for tax reasons my next gift was not until 2006.

As an aside, I should note that the triennial 10% gift is specifically for philanthropic efforts. I also make gifts to my church, to people I know personally who are in need, and to political organizations whose causes I support. But I don’t consider that philanthropy, I don’t make the analysis that I would for philanthropic gifts (which are much larger), and I don’t count such gifts toward my 10% donation.

Seeking a better way

After 2000 I did not give again until 2006, but I was not idle during the intervening years. Through The Economist I learned about two organizations of significance, Pratham (Economist article) and Geneva Global (Economist article). Pratham is an Indian educational charity notable for its built-in evaluation approach and closed-loop feedback process. Although Givewell did not exist at the time I discovered Pratham, it has since been reviewed and recommended by Givewell. Geneva Global is a for-profit company that provides advice to donors, especially in terms of impact prediction and evaluation. For their services they charge a fee equal to 15% of the amount donated. Of course, when the time came I also had another look at Freedom from Hunger. I didn’t have any other way to cut through the million charity options, so those became by default my three options to evaluate.

Of the three, I eliminated Freedom from Hunger early on. By now I saw that there was more to impact than glossy annual reports, and I had a growing skepticism about microfinance generally. I was still looking to address root causes; education seemed like a better bet; and Pratham seemed to be making a big difference there. Geneva Global’s main advantage was an appeal to expertise: Their job was to know where to give, so the only question in my mind was whether their expertise was worth the 15% price tag.

In the end, the choice came down to my own procrastination: I didn’t start contacting organizations to ask questions until December, and by the time I found out who at Pratham could answer my questions, they were already away for the holidays. I couldn’t get any substantive information from Pratham until after the new year - not even basic financial information, let alone detailed information about programs. Geneva Global, on the other hand, was beyond responsive: They had lots of detailed information on specific projects, and best of all, a brand-new fund which was offering a 1:1 match to attract starting capital. So instead of paying 15% overhead for Geneva Global, I would end up getting a 70% uplift. In the end, on December 29, 2010, I put a check in the mail for $14,000 toward Geneva Global’s Rwanda Human Empowerment Fund, a collection of projects focused on education, health, and land rights in Rwanda.

As it turns out, I probably chose poorly in 2006. Geneva Global went through a few different purchases and restructurings before winding down the Fund and sending out a final report. This indicated that the Fund had only attracted about a third of the expected amount, but that Geneva Global had begun spending in the first year on the assumption that additional donations would continue to come in. As a result most projects were cut off or could not be continued in the second and third years of the fund’s operation.

In addition, some projects looked highly questionable to my untrained eye. For example, one school project started construction on new classroms, but then shifted midway to make the building a large $64,000 dining hall instead. The school already had a dining hall; the only benefit mentioned in the report was that all 1,000 students could dine at once rather than in shifts. Another project complained that a grantee “lacks professionalism, transparency, and honesty”, leaving the project unfinished and the funds missing. Roughly 1/3 of the total fund was invested in a land rights initative, but the report diplomatically notes that the grantee, the International Justice Mission, “faced many challenges as an outsider”. Finally, none of the projects seemed to have much in the way of quantitative evaluation; with respect to the health initative, the executive summary notes that “Though no formal study has been conducted on the impact of these improved services on infant and maternal mortality rates, we have no doubt that they consequently declined”.

My overall impression was that Geneva Global’s in-county contractor had been given some combination of too much leeway and too little training, and that a substantial amount of the money was lost to subcontractors, spent on unplanned expenses, or wasted on poorly planned projects.

The main lesson I took away from this is that even with a fair amount of effort, giving for impact is really hard! So for my next gift, made in 2009, I determined to do a better job. I started the process early in the year with only Pratham in hand, but quickly discovered resources like GiveWell and Good Intentions are Not Enough. It seems that over the course of the 2000s, a lot of people got interested in impact philanthropy all at once.

Information: A trickle becomes a torrent

GiveWell turned out to be a critical source of information for my 2009 donation. Besides pointing me to exceptional organizations like Population Services International (PSI; Givewell review) and VillageReach (Givewell review), the GiveWell blog and its archives provided a steady supply of new perspectives on charity and giving, ideas which I had never encountered before. Sure, I had long suspected that there were large differences between charities, and had discovered through my own mistakes that giving was hard, but I had never thought about things like offsetting impacts, the complexities of microfinance interest and repayment rates, the costs of receiving aid, or room for more funding. GiveWell suggested some great organizations and then gave some useful benchmarks by which to measure them.

In the end, I settled on a shortlist of Pratham, PSI, and VillageReach. The latter two I discovered through GiveWell. PSI is a large international health charity with some innovative ideas about how to leverage markets to improve distribution and use of health products and services like condoms, bed nets, circumcision, and vaccination. VillageReach is a US charity originally operating exclusively in Mozambique which is notable for having one of the most complete and inarguable demonstrations of impact among charities of any size.

GiveWell also recommended a few other organizations that didn’t pique my interest as much. The Against Malaria Foundation (AMF; Givewell review) interested me less than PSI primarily because of the latter’s inclusion of reproductive health as an essential part of health care delivery. And the Stop TB Partnership (Givewell Review) is an organization which seems to be very effective, but which I heard about too late to consider for a 2006 donation. In addition, giving to the Stop TB partnership would be significantly more difficult, since it is not a US organization and since my 2009 donation was mostly in the form of appreciated stock.

I contacted all three organizations (Pratham, PSI, and VillageReach) and engaged each of them with a battery of questions regarding their programs, evaluations, use of marginal funds, and much more. Owing to the earlier date (and perhaps larger donation size), I had a very different experience compared to 2006: All three organizations were very much forthcoming with both information and time. I read a lot of reports, came back with more questions, and spent hours on the phone, both with charities and with folks from GiveWell. This was a tough decision, because the organizations are fairly different from each other but each with a compelling case.

Pratham was the first to be disqualified. Essentially, the majority of Pratham’s spending goes to two types of programs: Field programs, where Pratham operates remedial education sessions directly on a village-by-village basis, and Read India, where Pratham partners with local governments to improve the quantity and quality of education in public schools. In an attempt to reach the massive scale required for nationwide impact in India, Pratham has focused most of its growth on Read India. But the best case and evidence, both in terms of program design and in terms of third-party evaluation, is for the field programs. In late 2009, Pratham was in the midst of conducting rigorous controlled trials of a few Read India implementations. I have no doubt that they’ll make a strong showing for my 2012 gift, but to me there was not enough evidence on Read India to justify a gift in 2009.

That left PSI and VillageReach: Both health charities, though with very different scale and approaches, making for a difficult comparison. My decision was made more difficult by the fact that VillageReach was in the middle of its own strategic planning process while my evaluation was underway. Indeed, I had originally decided against VillageReach, but gave it new consideration according to new information provided at the last minute.

PSI is a large organization and a relatively known quantity. They provide a fairly advanced quantitative model attempting to translate any and all health interventions into Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), then allocating funds to the most cost-effective projects, as measured in cost per DALY. Of course, a large organization like PSI receives a lot of restricted funding, so the organization operates some projects even if they have very high cost per DALY. Nonetheless, PSI prepares detailed and easy-to-read reports on both impact and cost-effectiveness. The questions are likewise fairly straightforward: Is the model which translates pregnancies avoided into DALYs a correct one? Are the projects sustainable? Is PSI simply replacing health products and services that would be provided by free markets or governments, or is it expanding markets to consumers that would not be reached otherwise? PSI’s programs are clear but determining true impacts must unfortunately leave some of these questions unanswered.

VillageReach

VillageReach is another story. In order to understand the organization, you need to understand its history. VillageReach aims to improve health outcomes by making distribution systems for health products, especially vaccines, work more efficiently and effectively. The organization started its programs in 2002 with a pilot project in the Cabo Delgado province of Mozambique. VillageReach created a new approach to vaccine distribution, shifting the burden from health clinic workers to a set of staff and equipment dedicated to distribution. In addition to delivery personnel, VillageReach created a new job position to monitor the inventory of vaccines and the effectiveness of the delivery schemes. All these people nominally worked for the government, and all this equipment nominally belonged to the government, but VillageReach paid all the costs, whereas costs for pre-existing systems had been covered by the government. In order to make all this work, VillageReach had to create a whole new distribution company for propane gas, which was previously prohibitively expensive to purchase in Cabo Delgado. VillageReach reports that the company, named VidaGas, is now self-sustaining.

The pilot program ended in 2007, at which point VillageReach handed control over to the government, which promptly dismantled VillageReach’s work and returned to the previously extant approach. But in the meantime, VillageReach prepared two significant reports: One on impact and the other on cost. The two reports compared the cost and effectiveness of the VillageReach approach to the one the government had been using previously, by comparing vaccination rates in the trial province of Cabo Delgado to those in the neighboring province of Niassa. The conclusion is as powerful as it is inescapable: When compared to its neigbor, Cabo Delgado saw much higher rates of vaccination at significantly lower total cost. In other words, the VillageReach approach was lower-cost, not only on a per-vaccination basis but on an overall basis. Indeed, the vaccination program was so cheap that as a donor it would be considered a bargain even considering that VillageReach had to displace all the government spending.

This is the history I had in hand when I started talking to VillageReach in 2009. And when I asked the question, “what’s next?”, I was concerned about the answer. Of course, the vaccination program in Cabo Delgado had already been shut down for two years, and in its place VillageReach talked about a variety of consulting and advocacy programs. But I had no evidence about VillageReach’s effectiveness as council in any country, let alone in those far away from Mozambique. Essentially, given the future plan VillageReach had presented to me, I had to reject them: All the evidence of effectiveness was in relation to a program that was no longer operating.

So I decided to give to PSI. But I didn’t want to give them a free pass, so I resolved to evaluate them as thoroughly as I could, quickly compare that to some other organizations’ claims, and if PSI seemed adequate to choose them.

But, at the last minute, due in part to urging by GiveWell, I gave VillageReach one last phone call, wherein they explained a new agreement with the government of Mozambique to roll out the Cabo Delgado vaccination distribution approach nationwide. This seemed to me to be much closer to VillageReach’s proven pilot project and thus much likelier to be a success. The pilot project had been so successful that I couldn’t say no to a nationwide deployment, and so I gave my $35,000 2009 contribution to VillageReach. I later found out, much to my surprise, than this gift was and is their largest ever donation from an individual.

Back to the Future

Which brings us to the end of the story (for now). In an adventure spanning a bit over a decade, I’ve learned a lot of surprising things: Doing good is harder than it looks. Good intentions are not enough. Helping others is rewarding. And maybe, with the careful application of analytic thought, giving money really can make a difference. Like science, it’s a process of discovery. You try something out, you look to see how it goes, you learn something, and then you repeat the process, and hopefully your little extra knowledge and experience lets you see something deeper the next time around. It’s not easy, but it is possible.

As I look forward to the future of philanthropy, both mine and others’, it’s an exciting picture. There will be new discoveries about the nature of giving, and as the nonprofit sector grows daily more interested in measuring impact, the number of opportunities to give effectively grows with it. And I’m confident that my own skills at giving will continue to grow as well. Charity can change the world: Just make sure you look before you give.

Acknowledgements

This essay would not have been possible without the thoughts, ideas, inspiration, proofreading, and support of a surprisingly large group of friends and family and of the GiveWell staff. You have provided me with essential feedback for which I am unremittingly grateful.

Thanks also to the many people and organizations that have provided me with time, information and ideas throughout my philanthropic career. A donor can accomplish nothing without a place to give, and I am grateful for each of you, even when I have directed funds elsewhere. Our field is in an interesting time at the moment, and is well-poised for significant new accomplishments. Let’s make it happen.

This is a guest post from Dario Amodei about how he decided what charity to support for his most recent donation. Dario and GiveWell staff had several in-depth conversations as he worked through his decision, so we invited him to share his thought process here. Note that GiveWell has made minor editing suggestions for this post (though Dario determined the final content).

Before I get into the details of my donation decision, I’d like to first share a bit about myself: I’m a graduate student in physics at Princeton, and am interested, very broadly, in what I can do to make the world a better place. I feel that giving away a significant portion of my income is an important part of that, and since 2006 I’ve been donating to organizations that try to improve life in the developing world. I’ve always tried my best to make my donations as effective as possible, but on my own I was never able to give this task as much attention as it deserved. I happened upon GiveWell in 2008 through a link from an economics blog, and to date it’s been the single most useful resource I’ve found in deciding where to donate. Last year I gave $10,000 through GiveWell’s pledge fund, and ultimately decided to allocate all of this money to Village Reach. Holden and Elie have asked me to share the thought process I went through in making my decision, in the hopes that it might be of use to other donors facing a similar choice.

My focus has always been on developing-world health interventions, because I believe these interventions address some of the world’s most urgent needs in a highly tangible way. Six out of 12 of GiveWell’s recommended charities operate in this area, including some health charities I’ve donated to in the past. Reading GiveWell’s reports on these charities, it quickly became clear to me that the “three-star” organizations — Village Reach (VR) and Stop TB — really do stand out above the others. Though I respect and am impressed by the two star organizations, they all seem to have sizable holes in their case for efficacy: for instance, PIH seems to (completely?) lack data on medical outcomes, and the Global Fund seems to have problems with how to use additional funds (William Easterly also seems to have a strongly negative assessment of it in this diavlog ).

Thus, I decided to focus on VR (which aims to improve operational logistics for child vaccinations) and Stop TB (which provides governments with funds for tuberculosis treatment). Choosing between these very compelling charities proved difficult, but I don’t regret the considerable effort I put into my choice — as I tried to constantly remind myself, this choice should involve every bit as much effort as buying a $10,000 item for myself. I considered three relevant factors —

1. Cost-effectiveness
2. Execution
3. “Incentive effects” (explained more below)

Cost-effectiveness

GiveWell makes explicit cost effectiveness estimates (based in part on those of the Disease Control Priorities report) for both organizations: ~$545 per infant death averted for Village Reach, and >~$150-750 per death averted for Stop TB. These are roughly comparable, but don’t take into account the fact that Stop TB mainly treats adults, while VR mainly treats infants and children. I feel that adults are capable of deeper and more meaningful experiences than are infants, and also deeper connections with other people, so an adult death seems worse to me than an infant death (though both are of course bad). Trying to quantify exactly how much worse is very subjective and can also seem calculating (“how many babies would you kill to save an adult?”), but on a practical level one is forced to make difficult decisions with limited funds, and in my case I’d say that I think an adult death is perhaps 2 or 3 times worse than an infant’s death. Thus, adjusted for my personal values, I’d say that Stop TB is ~2-3 times more cost-effective than VR, though I understand that others may validly disagree with this subjective assessment.

Execution

The second factor, execution, is the one I find most important. By execution I mean all the factors that are assumed to go right in an ideal cost-effectiveness calculation, but could go wrong in practice. I take Murphy’s Law very seriously, and think it’s best to view complex undertakings as going wrong by default, while requiring extremely careful management to go right. This problem is especially severe in charity, where recipients have no direct way of telling donors whether an intervention is working. The situation is worse yet in the developing world, where projects cannot count on the reliable infrastructure and basic social trust we take for granted in the developed world. Given all these problems, what I look for in a charity is a simple and short chain of execution in which relatively few things can go wrong, together with rigorous efforts to close whatever loopholes do exist. As far as I can tell, VR fits these criteria better than any other charity I’ve encountered. Vaccines unquestionably save lives if correctly administered, so it’s generally enough to show that functional vaccines are being correctly delivered and administered. Roughly, the major questions I want answered about a vaccination program are:

(a) are the vaccines actually delivered to health clinics?
(b) do the vaccines remain effective during transport and storage?
(c) once in storage, are the vaccines actually administered, and safely so?
(d) does the program have a clear plan for spending additional money, so that donations actually translate to more vaccines?
(e) are vaccination rates measured to check that the whole chain is working?

I won’t go through the details, which are in GiveWell’s report, but VR makes a systematic effort to address each question. Deliveries are tracked by phone in real-time (e.g. (a)), VR takes an active role in providing power for refrigerators to keep vaccines cold (e.g. (b)), sterilization equipment is provided and stock outs are tracked (which at least suggests successful administration (c)), VR has a clear plan (d) for how to use additional funds, and changes in vaccination rates are measured with controls (e). These steps aren’t perfect – for example, there is apparently no systematic reporting confirming the actual correct administration of vaccines, so step (c) has some room for error — but overall the chain of execution is tighter than any I’ve seen, and the potential holes seem small enough to be manageable.

By contrast, in Stop TB’s case, such a chain (if I could even write it down) would be much longer — Stop TB hands drugs over to governments (involving several layers of administration, differing from country to country) which then must perform all the logistical details VR must perform, plus diagnostics, recurring treatments, and in some cases second-line treatment. There is also the possibility of TB evolving resistance if treatments are not correctly administered. Stop TB’s random inspections, cure rate data, and external auditing seem suggestive of positive results, but my inability to examine in detail a process that I know is quite complex ultimately leaves me very suspicious about efficacy. This isn’t just a matter of Stop TB being a large organization; rather, the problem is that I can’t see the full process of treatment setup and administration, whether applied to one person or a million. Lacking that clear and full view of Stop TB, I have to conclude that VR is the winner on execution.

Incentive effects

Given only VR’s superiority on execution and StopTB’s superiority on cost-effectiveness, I would be about equally inclined to support either, with perhaps a small edge to VR because execution is so critical. However, it’s important to look at the incentive effects of my donation — the money I give out is not just a one-shot intervention, but also a vote on what I want the philanthropic sector to look like in the future. Along these lines, I see three additional advantages to VR, which make it the clear winner in my mind:

1. VR’s small size means that funds given to it through GiveWell could greatly change its funding situation (GiveWell seems to have been responsible for a sizable fraction of VR’s total donations last year). What happens to Village Reach could make a notable impression on other charities, which badly need to hear that focusing on efficacy can pay off.
2. In my view, incentivizing careful execution is a higher priority right now than incentivizing cost-effectiveness. Cost-effectiveness would be important if there were many good charitable opportunities and not enough money to fund them all. Instead, the current situation seems to be that a lot of programs are probably a waste of money. It thus makes sense, from an incentive point of view, to reward charities that focus maximally on execution — such as VR.
3. Logistics and efficiency are extremely important, but don’t make for good headlines. VR should be getting a lot more money than it is, and I want to tell the philanthropic sector that charities can succeed without being flashy.

In addition to all the arguments listed above, there were a number of other factors which I thought about (some of which were raised in GiveWell’s reports and posts) but ultimately had a hard time getting a handle on and so did not give much weight to. I considered too many factors to list them all, but here are a few examples:

• By lowering child mortality, could VR have different effects on population growth than Stop TB? If so, is population growth beneficial or harmful?
• A vaccination or treatment doesn’t only save one person; it also impedes the spread of the disease. Could TB treatment and child vaccinations differ in how much they do this?
• Stop TB treats people who live in less isolated areas and thus have more opportunity to interact with others and indirectly improve their lives. How important is this?
• VR’s logistics ideas could be applied to many health interventions. If VR’s model spreads and proves effective on a wider scale, how large would the overall benefits be?

Any one of these effects could theoretically be important enough to outweigh all my arguments for VR, so this list serves as a reminder that there can never be any guarantees of efficacy, let alone optimality. Uncertainty, however, is simply part of life, and all I can do is go with my best guess, so I decided to give to VR.

I hope (though I cannot be sure) that my donation will save the lives of 20 children (which is what the cost-effectiveness numbers work out to). That’s a truly staggering benefit, and honestly it came at very little cost to myself: I don’t much miss the new car I didn’t buy, and I’ll gladly make the same sacrifice next year in order to donate again. What did feel very emotionally taxing was reading (and in most cases, agreeing with) all the negative analysis of charities at GiveWell and elsewhere. I found it difficult to evaluate everything in a critical fashion while still holding on to the compassion and optimism that originally inspired me to donate. It’s tough to find the right balance between caring and hard-nosed realism, but it is possible, and it is, as far as I know, the only way to truly change the world.