The GiveWell Blog

Where should you give?

This post is more than 16 years old

When you’re donating, do you want a “safe and reputable” charity – or the best?

From fighting disease in Africa to improving inner-city education, helping people isn’t simple – for charities OR for donors.

That’s why it isn’t enough to know that “99% of your money goes to programs.” (In fact, we think it’s often a bad thing). What really matters is what the programs are, and whether they’re helping people.

That’s why we’ve been working for months trying to find a donor’s best bet, in causes from employment assistance (NYC) to saving lives (Africa).

And that’s why we’re now sharing what we’ve found. Initially, only one cause (employment assistance) will be available. We’ll be putting up more research as we complete it. Giving season is upon us, and we want to help as many donors as we can.

Our research is now available at www.givewell.org. If you’re trying to help people, don’t miss it. If you’ve got any questions, let me know.

This year, don’t just give generously. Give well.

Comments

  • I have been following your blog since April and have learned quite a bit by watching ideas take shape and evolve (particularly in the way you challenge conventional measurements of charities). There has been a certain amount of expectation/suspense in waiting to see what the final “formula” for evaluation looks like.
    You’ve come across in your own research the same thing that I have in regards to that % of funds towards the cause metric…it’s borderline irrelevant. I say borderline because there is a piece there that can reflect how fiscally responsible or cost effective an organization is that gets reflected in that number…granted it takes a bit more analysis to get to the detail, but it’s safe to say if you saw a charity with a 60/40 ratio of money going towards programs/admin costs a red light is going to go off.
    “What really matters is what the programs are, and whether they’re helping people.”
    That right there has been a huge struggle to determine. So I have a few questions for you:
    -Do you still plan to do the following? “we want to share what we find in a centralized, organized place, where all the world can view, use, discuss, criticize, and improve it.”?
    If yes, will you also share the methodology used? Or is that really dependent on the type of organization you are evaluating?
    -Do you foresee your organization offering services to other organizations whom are looking for help in determining how to give their donor base the best bang for their buck?

    p.s. I hesitated using words like formula and methodology because I know this isn’t some computer algorithm that you just feed charity data into and it spits out “hey you are great” or “hey you are wasting our money”.

  • Do you still plan to do the following? “we want to share what we find in a centralized, organized place, where all the world can view, use, discuss, criticize, and improve it.”?
    If yes, will you also share the methodology used? Or is that really dependent on the type of organization you are evaluating?

    Justin – see http://www.givewell.org, public as of today. If that isn’t living up to this description, please let me know.

    Do you foresee your organization offering services to other organizations whom are looking for help in determining how to give their donor base the best bang for their buck?

    Maybe, if there’s interest. Largely, I feel that if we do a good job sharing everything via the web, people won’t have to come to us – all the conferencing and brainstorming and networking that people talk about in this area will be irrelevant, because everything we think and all the methodology we use is sitting right there.

  • Gates Keeper on November 18, 2007 at 6:12 am said:

    I love the pie chart. Any idea how much of “us” is us giving to churches and other faith organisations?

    Gates Keeper

  • We wrote a more detailed document on our mission that includes a better attempt to estimate this. It’s available through the link at the top of this page. We used a paper by Google.org trying to estimate how much of what people donate is specifically aimed at helping those in need, as opposed to arts, church, and other public goods. Off the top of my head, I think it came out to around $60 billion. Less than $200 billion, but still way bigger than Gates or all foundations combined. Plus, a ton of those foundations are family foundations and should really be considered “individuals.” And, the chart above is from tax records, so it leaves out a lot of individual donations (while not leaving out any foundation donations). So, bottom line, the adjusted picture is more complicated than that pie chart, but same basic idea.

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