“Current GiveWell staff are primarily interested in humanitarian giving”

For example, let’s say for argument’s sake it takes $1 million to save a species from extinction and the same amount of money would save a thousand human lives out of a population of 7 billion. How would you respond to someone who argues that while human lives are more valuable, they’re (we’re) not 7 million times more valuable (as the above numbers might crudely suggest although that’s obviously far from a necessary conclusion to put it mildly)?

I’d (imperfectly) analogize the conservation vs. humanitarian decision to the local vs. global humanitarian one. You rightly challenge people and organizations that decide up front with minimal reflection they want to give locally. You argue that because you can get such a greater bang for the buck in terms of human welfare overseas, that must overwhelm other considerations. (By other considerations I mean e.g. the feeling of a greater moral responsibility to those closer to home and/or a greater confidence that one understands local problems and what will truly help.)

Bottom line: I think it would helpful to analyze and flesh out the moral intuition that leads you to prioritize humanitarian interventions.

I’m not pretending I have any answers here, by the way. In my own charitable giving, I’ve moved towards more of an emphasis on global health intervention while still giving significantly to local charities and relatively little to conservation. But I do think these are important questions.

IC is a good example of peoples actual life experience being made into a movement - could happen around any issue. I would have been more supportive of IC if the film would have mentioned their on the ground impacts - it makes it seem as though they have one mission when they have accomplished more. Charity Navigator looks more inclusive. Their assessment of IC is straight forward:
“We give the charity 4 out of a possible 4 stars for its Financial Health. It spends upwards of 80% of its budget on its programs and services. As such, Invisible Children is actually outperforming most charities in our database in terms of how it allocations its expenses….” They gave lower marks for lack of Board development.

• The two questions we listed should be thought of as “key specific questions to investigate,” not “key conceptual questions for decisionmaking.” Our framework for identifying a promising cause is similar to yours; see our previous post on the matter.And in fact we do have climate change on our short list of causes, as we wrote today.
• We thought about trying to include government funding in our “what is under-invested in?” analysis. But government funding is often fundamentally different from philanthropic funding; in fact, the presence of a lot of government funding in an area could be seen as an argument in favor of philanthropic investing in that area, since small contributions by philanthropic funding could lead to big changes in how government funds are spent.

  When investigating a particular cause, we think it’s important to understand the dynamics of government funding, but when trying to get a bird’s-eye view of all causes, we think including government funding would be more likely to muddle the picture than to clarify it (unless a lot of work were done to understand which government funding streams behave more and less like philanthropic funding).

  Bottom line - we agree with you that it’s important to consider government funding, and have left it out of our preliminary bird’s-eye-view investigation for practical reasons.

• We also agree that considering our own strengths and weaknesses, relative to other funders, is a relevant consideration; but we don’t have much understanding of this consideration yet, aside from the belief that we are relatively strong on transparency (which doesn’t seem to indicate that we should focus on one cause or another).

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and data sources on this.

I think that your two questions for strategic cause selection are on the right track but are too narrow. To me, they would be:

1) Where is it possible to have an impact?
2) Where are others trying to achieve an impact?
3) Given this, where might I have a unique impact?

The history of philanthropy is one key factor in identifying what might work, but if you looked only at the history of philanthropy, you would miss emerging needs and opportunities. For example, climate change adaptation would not on the radar if you had done a retrospective examination 20 years ago.

Once you establish the pool of potential ideas, which of those are getting funding? The key difference between my framing and yours is that I do not limit it to philanthropies — what looks like a strategic gap in philanthropy funding might actually be a cause dominated by government funding. If you are really going to get into the weeds (and it certainly looks like you are) you should also consider government-funded programs.

Finally, you have a list of high-potential ideas that are under-funded. What are your own “competitive advantages” as a funder that would allow you to bring unique value to those causes? For example, CIFF reportedly takes a far more active role in their investments than many other foundations. This will undoubtedly influence the types of causes and organizations they choose to work with. A foundation engaging in strategic cause selection needs to answer not only why is this cause right, but also why is it right for me?

On a side note, it is really refreshing to see an organization like yours be honest about miscommunications and other imperfections. It gives me the confidence to trust your recommendations.