We are looking to hire a Research Analyst to help us collect and analyze data on several hundred international charities, and ultimately identify the ones that can best use donations to change lives. If you believe you are a good fit – or know someone who is – please send a resume to info@givewell.net.

About the role

We are currently conducting an in-depth examination of international aid charities. At first, the Analyst will focus on helping us to collect information from charities’ websites and annual reports about what sorts of programs they run; we will match this information with academic literature on which sorts of programs are highly cost-effective, in order to identify charities with the greatest potential to have a real impact. Over time, the Analyst may become a permanent member of our research team, with broader responsibilities.

This is an entry-level, full-time position. The start date will be on or before Jan. 1. You must have permission to work in the U.S.

No particular experience or skills are required. Instead, we are looking for a quick learner and independent thinker, with genuine passion for our mission and interest in our work.

The Analyst will be our third employee. The first two are located in New York City and Boston. The new employee can work from anywhere as long as s/he is accessible via phone and IM. This role is full-time, but will be terminated within a few months if the fit is not good. It is not a good fit for someone whose primary concern is job security. It is an excellent fit for someone who is genuinely passionate about our vision of a world where charities raise money not just by traditional marketing techniques, but by truly demonstrating their ability to change lives.

Philanthropy Action (co-maintained by Board member Tim Ogden) has an interview up with Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, principals of the Poverty Action Lab (one of our favorite groups). This quote (from Esther Duflo) particularly resonated with me:

There is no evaluation yet of the impact of a microfinance loan – we have the first preliminary results ever of the impact of a plain vanilla, group lending microfinance model. That’s it. It is not as if there have been mixed results before now. The studies don’t exist. And that is microfinance, where there are already a hundred economists studying it.

Microfinance fortunately did not go out of fashion before [randomized evaluation] came into fashion, so we have a chance to have a meeting of minds here. But other things did. Take fertilizer subsidies: at first they were fashionable, now they are unfashionable. In the meantime we have not learned what fertilizer subsidies do. They might be good or bad, at this point I don’t know. They’re coming back in fashion, by the way. All of this without a single piece of evidence about whether a subsidy changes the demand for fertilizer. This is just one example of what to me is the biggest mistake, which is doing the same things over and over and over again without learning from the experience, whether it is fertilizer subsidies or microfinance.

I recommend the whole thing.

To me, the most interesting part of the recent discussion of FORGE (see the last several posts on Tactical Philanthropy) is the disclosure that moving to a more effective model directly caused a loss of revenue, because it lowered volunteer involvement.

In a nutshell, FORGE runs programs for refugee communities; it shifted from having volunteers manage the programs to having the refugees themselves manage them. (More here). I’ll take FORGE at its word that the refugees were easier to manage (it’s plausible to me that they were more plugged into their communities and therefore more effective).

But apparently, the lack of work for volunteers translated directly into a loss of funding, because volunteers doubled as fundraisers. Logically, I’d think that if you were volunteering for a cause you were passionate about, and then you were released in order to make the program more effective, you would now be more excited (not to mention having more time) to raise money from your friends. But that isn’t what happened.

This story matches with anecdotes we’ve heard from many people in the nonprofit sector, claiming that volunteers are essentially useless in program terms (i.e., they cost more time to manage than the value they add). I believe that to many charities, using volunteers is a way to get people personally involved with, excited about, and personally invested in the organization so that they’ll donate and fundraise, the real value-added.

I’ve generally found that adding a new person into a work process nearly always costs a lot of time, especially up front, for training and managing. It can be worth it if (a) they’re going to put in enough hours to overcome that cost eventually; (b) the task they’re working on is extremely well-defined, meaning minimal management. As we get more systematic about our research process, we are able to use volunteers more effectively (and in fact have several working well now, with more slots open); but there have been times in the past when we’ve had far more requests for volunteer work than useful things for people to do. (When this has happened we’ve simply turned away the volunteers – our policy is to take volunteers only when we have good work for them.)

Next time you’re thinking of volunteering for a charity, ask yourself if you’re looking to do good or feel good. If the former, take a hard look at whether what you’re doing is really worth as much to the charity as a donation.

(As a side note on FORGE: I applaud FORGE’s honesty about past mistakes in this area. I agree with Sean’s claim that “in a world with limited transparency, we need to celebrate transparency on its own.” And I even think that there’s some argument to be made for promoting and supporting FORGE just for showing unusual honesty. However, I also agree with with Curtis Chang that FORGE hasn’t yet made a good case for its actual impact on people’s lives.)

In addition to our charity-specific investigations, we’re looking to review as much literature as possible on the following questions. Note that these were originally posted to our email list, before it went public.

1. What is the evidence that aid works/has worked at all? That it has caused reductions in infant mortality, economic growth, or anything else?
2. Has aid worked better in some parts of the world than others? Are there any broad patterns in where and when aid works (as opposed to what interventions)?
3. Can we expect health aid to create economic growth? Can we expect economic aid to work in areas where health is poor?
4. Why have some parts of the world emerged from poverty while others haven’t? Is there anything aid can do to make the former more likely? (#2 is about whether aid has accomplished proximate goals like improving health – #3 asks what the biggest success stories are and whether there’s any plausible case that aid *could* accelerate them.)
5. What are the risks of aid causing harm, and what evidence is there for their severity? Possibly ways that aid can cause harm include:
   • Overpopulation due to declining mortality
   • Crowding out government aid; encouraging governments to remain corrupt
   • Talent drain: turning all of Africa’s brightest into health/aid workers
   • Economic distortion: outcompeting private farmers and for-profit aid companies with subsidized prices
6. What is the current allocation of aid across the world? How much of it is going to programs that don’t work or aren’t proven? How much of it is going to programs that appear overfunded?
7. How can one determine whether an intervention is funded to capacity?

Via Joanne Jacobs: San Francisco Chronicle reports that Oklahoma and Georgia have seen no improvement on achievement test scores since implementing universal preschool programs. It also refers to a discouraging-sounding large-scale study of Tennessee’s preschool program, although it doesn’t give a specific citation (and I can’t find one online).

A couple things to keep in mind:

• All of the discouraging results cited here refer to achievement test scores. Possible impacts on mental health, later life outcomes, etc. are not discussed.
• The Tennessee finding is reported as excluding “at-risk kids.” We’ve always thought it very possible that early childhood care is most beneficial to at-risk children, and indeed that the gains for such children may account for the entire observed effects.

Our existing position on large-scale preschool programs is that no strong evidence exists for their effectiveness. The programs discussed here are unusually high-intensity programs, so the findings do call into question whether replicating the encouraging results of model programs is even theoretically possible.

Note that none of this discussion pertains directly to our current top charity in early childhood care, the Nurse-Family Partnership (our review here).