Elie and I have been arguing pretty heatedly, and we decided to put our argument online so you all can weigh in if you’d like. The topic is a bit dry, but absolutely essential, and a question that anyone interested in donating can answer. Here’s the question:

What should our Round Two application cover, or, how do you evaluate a mammoth charity?

Background: Our Round One app avoided this issue neatly, by asking each charity to focus on a single program of its choice. The goal was to narrow the field to the charities that are good at documenting what they do; before we ask who’s best at saving lives, for example, we need to make sure we’re dealing with charities that can give us some idea of what they did and how many lives they likely saved. But for Round Two, we can’t be so narrow: we really need to know who’s going to use our money to do as much good as possible. And when a charity has vast array of different programs in different countries (as so many Africa charities do), how can we figure out how good they are, without spending years on the app?

I want one approach; Elie wants another. Here we go – turn off that baseball game and watch the sparks fly on the GiveWell Blog, where ideas fight to the death!

Holden and I have been reviewing applications for Cause 5: help disadvantaged adults become economically self-supporting. This is what we’ve learned so far and what we’re just generally wondering about.

We initially envisioned this cause pretty broadly, but we’ve found that there are a critical mass of organizations that follow the same basic model: take disadvantaged (largely unemployed African-Americans and Latinos) people, train them in both a specific vocation and in how to get a job (e.g., resume writing and interviewing help), place them in a job, and follow up with them to track their progress and help them retain their opsition.

We want to know how much good each organization effects for the dollars that donors spend. For us, that means understanding where each individual would have been had Organization X not helped him and where he is because they helped him. Roughly, that equates to understanding:

• The population each organization serves. Although each organization follows the same basic model for improving economic opportunity, they differ on whose lives they try to improve (though all focus on low-income, largely-minorities). On one end of the spectrum, some recruit the best and the brightest, taking only 25% of applicants (who they put through a rigorous interviewing process testing their motivation) and requiring a high school diploma or the equivalent. On the other hand, some organizations attempt to help all those who walk in, trying to train homeless, unemployed, poorly educated (often those with only at fifth-grade level for reading and math) and many who have a criminal record and a history of substance abuse.
• The outcomes they achieve. We (and the organizations who’ve applied) have three ways of tracking outcomes: people who get jobs, how long they keep those jobs, and how much they make.
• The cause of the change. Understanding the population served and the outcomes achieved will allow us to better understand each organization’s effect on those it serves. For example, it seems likely an organization which selects only 25% of those who apply (and interviews particularly for motivation) and accepts only those who have graduated high school will likely have graduates with better outcomes (higher paying jobs held for longer periods of time) than those organizations which select previously homeless, poorly-educated clients. But, Organization 1 is not achieving those outcomes because it has a better program. It’s achieving better outcomes because it selects people who would likely have gotten there (or at least improved) without any help in the first place. How many of these people do you think would have been fine without any help? Or at least, with extremely minimal help – could these organizations serve a lot more people (and basically get the same results) by cutting way back on services?
• Cost. Well, last but not least, what does it cost each organization to effect that change?

Right now, we’re leaning toward passing the organizations that provided us with outcomes data (how many of their clients got jobs, and how long they stayed in them) to the next round – if an organization didn’t even tell us this (when we asked for it quite clearly in our application), evaluating their results is just going to be too much of an uphill battle. With these orgs, we’re going to get all the data we can get from them about what results they got and what population they served. Then comes the hard part: figuring out what the “benchmark” should be for that population (i.e., how they likely would have done without this help). NYC has some pretty detailed census data, so we hope we’ll be able to get at least some idea of what’s “normal” for people in different neighborhoods at different levels of education.

Well, that’s what’s on my mind. What do you think?

Thanks to all who participated in the Giving Carnival. The question was, “What charitable cause are you personally most passionate about?”, and different people read it in different ways.

Some people read it as: what’s your favorite organization?

Network For Good’s Katya names five organizations whose activities vary wildly, explaining that the common thread is a personal connection to the organizations and their work.

The Agitator’s Tom Belford supports the Ashoka social entrepreneurship program, pointing to its “breadth of human concern, its focus on the neediest on the planet, its ‘betting’ on the chemistry of person and idea, its enormous leveraging power, and its proven track record in country after country.”

Gillian, whose blog is called The School of St. Jude, gives the case for guess what organization. (Click to find out!)

Marianne Genetti plugs her organization, INOD.

Some people read it as: whom do you want to help and how?

I explore my passion for inner-city education, and my hatred for the notion that “the world as of 2007 is a reflection of justice.”

Clear Fund Program Officer Elie Hassenfeld prefers our Africa-centered causes. While I’m most motivated by wanting to knock down evil ideas, he’s more enraged by “badness”, the kind of incomptence/coordination problem that leads to children dying for lack of medicine that costs pennies.

Open Hands‘s Mark Petersen finds common threads in the recent projects that have excited him most. His personal experience has made him passionate about Colombia, as well as about projects that “don’t ignore spiritual needs.”

The Nonprofiteer defends reproductive freedom for women, and like me is heavily motivated by the “bad guys” who oppose her: “In supporting this goal I’m swimming against the tide of fundamentalism; so much the better.”

Molly focuses on the question of “what would I least likely wish to be born into,” and concludes that oppressed third-world girls are most in need of our help.

Some people read it as: what is the most fundamental way in which the world needs to change?

Gift Hub‘s Phil Cubeta outlines a rich vision of a world where “Each person is able and willing to interact in adulthood as a citizen among citizens, not just as a consumer or producer or salesperson.” He embraces plurality in giving, and is himself most interested in promoting better dialogue.

White Courtesy Telephone’s Albert Ruesga works his way, conceptually, to the “root cause” standing behind the problems we see: a broken political system. He concludes that campaign finance-reform should be the highest priority.

Some people read it as: why do you do what you do?

Gayle Roberts gives a full breakdown of “how I currently give of my time, talent and treasure.”

Evonne Heyning says that it all comes down to love.

Closing thoughts

As expected and intended, this was a huge mishmash of different perspectives. If one thing surprised me (besides the different ways in which the question was read), it was how little “tribalism” I saw. It’s conventional wisdom that people support the organizations whose people they’ve met and the causes that have affected them and their friends, but this particular group of people seems more interested in “giving in general,” and open to all the many possible ways to fight for better lives for others.

I’ve begged and begged foundations for their outcome reports on the charities they fund, and the most common response I’ve gotten is that they must keep this information confidential.

Our application materials clearly state that everything sent is public record unless specified otherwise, and each Round One app concludes with a request that the charity tell us what needs to be kept under wraps.

Turnout has been pretty strong – 1/3 of the charities we initially invited to apply have submitted – and almost no one has made use of their right to confidentiality, except regarding budget info (generally, only salary info). Of the charities who didn’t participate, nearly all of them cited some version of “a lot of work for not a lot of money” – only one even mentioned the public nature of the process as a concern.

It’s possible, of course, that charities are just leaving their top-secret reports on how to help people out of their apps (though it’s not clear why they’d do so, instead of just marking them confidential). But it makes me wonder … who’s really afraid of a little sunlight? Charities – or foundations?

I’m starting full-time at GiveWell today largely because I can’t think of a bigger problem that needs solving than poor, African children dying from a handful of diseases that we, in the developed world, cured/dealt with half-a-century ago ( e.g., diarrhea, malaria, tuberculosis, and pneumonia). So, we no longer have to solve the difficult problem of understanding what causes, say, malaria and what methods work to reduce its incidence. We only have to solve the relatively easy, logistical problem of providing that care.

Although there are a lot of problems in the world (from “charitable” problems like inner-city education in the New York City to “business” problems like the method use by most renters to rent an apartment through a random smattering of under-informed, ill-mannered brokers), I can’t think of any others that have the absurd implementation simplicity to impact that this one does.

One of the things I hate most is, for lack of a better term, is “badness.” I’m talking less about “evil” than general incompetence and failure: things that make no sense for no good reason. Well, I don’t just hate this – I can’t stand it. I can’t stand that thousands of children die everyday because they don’t have a $5 net under which to sleep, a 5 cent pill when they contract diarrhea, or other similarly inexpensive items that you or I take for granted.

Children die because they don’t receive care that costs as much as my morning cup of coffee? How could that be true? How can I let that be true?

On a more personal/emotional note: Last Monday, my father went to the funeral of a childhood friend of his who passed away from cancer. On the phone that night, he told me how sad the funeral was: this relatively young woman left her husband, two children, and her mother (who was planning to move in with her daughter that day). Every time I think of a young person dying, I’m struck by how uniquely tragic that particularly event feels. Then, I think about how many similarly tragic events occur daily. Each four year-old girl who dies of diarrhea is someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s friend. Each thirty year-old man who dies of AIDS is someone’s father, someone’s son, someone’s friend. I want to fight that. I want to reduce that suffering. I want to save those lives, especially because saving them is just not that hard.