I gave to a group fighting Proposition 8 in California because it struck me as a really good opportunity to make a difference with a donation. This is about as far from our normal focus as it gets, and I don’t have nearly the knowledge of political advocacy that I would like to have, so I’m not going to go into this much. But in a nutshell:

• The polling on this issue looks close. Unlike the Presidential election, it may be close enough that some extra advertising could make the big difference.
• I’d also guess that it’s relatively easy to translate dollars into votes for something like this. A lot of people will be turning out primarily to vote for President; a well-done ad or phone call, or just a reminder, could be enough to get them to vote No on Proposition 8.
• As such, I don’t really need to be convinced that the people running this organization are particularly brilliant or have amazing advertising abilities; as long as they’re using money to do things like run ads and make phone calls, it’s probably money well spent. (And there is enough content on the website that I don’t fear fraud.)
• I feel strongly that gay couples should be able to get legal marriage licenses. I think most political issues are more complex/two-sided than advocates recognize, but not this one. If you feel differently, this post doesn’t apply to you, and that’s fine.

I hope that sometime in the future, we’re able to learn more about the conditions under which advocacy money matters and the conditions under which it doesn’t. With what little I know, and even without an ability to remotely quantify it, this seemed like too good of a buy to pass up, so I’m passing it on.

GiveWell has maintained a mailing list since late July that we use to share our notes on research in progress. The emails tend to be more detailed and less theme-driven than blog posts, and the volume tends to be higher (averaging around an email a day, except when we’re heavily focused on non-research aspects of our project).

We are now making the contents of the list (though not the full identities of participants) public. We also invite anyone who is interested in participating to apply via the list’s page; we will approve anyone we feel is applying out of legitimate interest in our research. The list’s page is here:

GiveWell Research Mailing List on Yahoo! Groups

Note that old emails to the list (between its start in July and its opening late last week) are not currently available, due to our recent switch from Google Groups to Yahoo! Groups (the latter offers superior privacy protection for list members).

This book excerpt (via Overcoming Bias) suggests that stressing the health benefits of latrines can be less effective than stressing the pride benefits of “feel[ing] royal, because the royal family had one.”

Also mentions that the Community-Led Total Sanitation program (which we’ve discussed before) stresses “disgust” over safety concerns.

More evidence that health education can work in counterintuitive ways, implying the value of constant experimentation and evaluation rather than merely recording “class attendees.” (Similar ideas discussed previously here).

We received the following email from reader David Micley:

I want to donate $500 to an effective charity. Ive been doing research on your site and it seems like PSI is a great choice in terms of helping global health. I have not yet made my decision as to which charity I will donate to, but as I continue to research, I continue to ask myself a fundamental question. How much of my money actually makes a difference in the effectiveness of a large charity? The amount of money that a huge charity has such as PSI makes me feel as if my $500 will be but a penny in a wishing well. Will my money be more effective donating to smaller charities that are in more need of money? Or is the large charity truly the place to find the most effective charitable work, and even if I feel my impact isn’t so strong relative to the size of the charity, it will be the most efficient way to help other people in need?

Our FAQ recommends that small donors with little information give to larger charities, but doesn’t address this angle – the question of whether $500 has more impact when it’s a larger percentage of the budget.

My view is that the size of a charity is less relevant here than whether it is operating at full capacity.

If a charity is already at an “equilibrium” where its costs are about equal to revenues, and it’s serving everyone its core activities can serve, then it will get questionable value for an extra $500. This is true whether the charity is large or small. It may attempt to expand its activities, start new programs, and serve more people, but a $500 donation seems unlikely to be the key driver behind such an expansion.

If a charity has more clients than it can currently afford to serve, or more worthwhile projects on the table than it can currently fund, a $500 donation can help it serve more people (or serve them better) – regardless of how big the charity is as a whole. To use a for-profit analogy, when you give McDonald’s 99c, your contribution is an extremely tiny percentage of its overall revenue, but it still produces an extra burger. McDonald’s, Inc. had no role in endorsing or funding this analogy.

Figuring out the extent to which a charity is “at capacity,” and what the impact of additional funds will be, is something that we struggle with, and we have no easy or fully reliable way of doing it. However, it’s worth noting that a large charity may be better positioned to handle increases in revenue, and use them to expand projects that are already repeatable/scalable, than a small one. And we feel relatively confident that the large charities we recommend are very far from serving everyone they could serve.

For this reason, the “will I make a difference?” question seems to tilt slightly in favor of giving to large charities when making small donations. $500 might be a small percentage of PSI’s revenues, but if you put credence in our estimate that PSI prevents a death for every ~$1000, that donation can be a huge deal in human terms.

We constantly emphasize the huge amount of money that is given by individuals. However, the figures we usually point to refer to all giving; people often, correctly, point out to us that many individual gifts are made to support churches, alma maters, public goods, etc., rather than to help those in need.

A study by Google.org and the Center for Philanthropy at Indiana University provides some analysis on exactly this point. It uses survey data to examine how much of individuals’ giving is actually intended to help those in need. It estimates both the amount given directly to humanitarian organizations (3rd column) and the amount given “indirectly” to help those in need – for example, donations to churches that use some of their funds for humanitarian programs (4th column). The summary table is below, taken from page 29.

Note that individuals making less than $1 million per year account for ~$66 billion of giving focused on the needs of the poor, $17 billion of which is given directly to relevant organizations. These numbers are smaller than the headline number of $223 billion, but they’re still huge (and still dwarf the giving of Gates and other foundations).

(This study has been around for a while and we cited it in our original business plan, but we’ve never made this point directly on our website.)

The last blog post shares general thoughts on Money Well Spent. Specifically, though, this bit really struck me (page 12):

In our personal lives, we regularly make year-end gifts to organizations for which we have warm feelings. These gifts make us feel good, and doubtless they help good organizations. But this isn’t the way to change the world, and it certainly is not a responsible way to give away someone else’s money.

Why give away your own money in a way that would be “irresponsible” with someone else’s?

Why be smart, disciplined and strategic when giving large grants, and then drop all of these principles for your individual gifts?

Especially when individual gifts collectively dwarf foundations’ grants?