We’re still right in the thick of things in Cause 1: we’ve received applications from about half our finalists and are still waiting on the other half. Two of those we received are causing me the most difficulty: Population Services International and UNICEF.

PSI didn’t fill out our matrix, but it sent us their version. PSI measures the units of pills, condoms, bed-nets, etc. that they sell every year (giving us data back to 1999), and they match up volumes sold with research on disease prevalence, treatment efficacy, and expected utilization rates. That, combined with clear measures of how much they spend each year allows us to create a picture that’s clear about exactly what PSI is accomplishing.

UNICEF, because it’s so big – roughly 5 times the size of PSI, itself one of the largest non-profits out there – sent us a variety of reports, outcomes, and research papers, all of which just scratch the surface on UNICEF’s activities. But, what UNICEF gave us raises the question that their approach could be better.

UNICEF provided a top down picture of the biggest killers of children around the world, the priority places to implement their programs, and a fully-integrated approach to attacking all the barriers to healthy life facing African children. In one of the programs detailed, UNICEF provides full medical care to children in specific areas and then measures the impact on the villages it works in relative to other surrounding villages that don’t have the necessary services. UNICEF doesn’t just care for a subset of disease or conditions – they focus on a group of people and work to keep them healthy. While there’s a lot to be said for distributing cheap, effective medicine to needy people, given the complexity of problems and the multitude of diseases an approach based on people might be smarter.

But, then again, it’s hard to know because UNICEF is huge and only provided data for a couple programs that barely scratch the surface of the array of programs they run. Though we think UNICEF’s approach is smart, we have no idea what good we’re buying with our grant.

So what do we do? Even if Holden and I had the capacity to read aggregate and understand every report UNICEF has, they don’t have time to collect them all and send them to us. They just have too much information. So, you could argue that PSI can prove what they accomplish, and UNICEF can’t, so PSI is the better choice. But, neither Holden nor I likes the idea of awarding a grant because someone measures what they do. We want to pick the organizations that do the most good, and measurement is the best way to figure that out. We’ve got one organization giving us the whole story, and another giving us part of what might be a better one. Thoughts?

I’ve been thinking a lot today about the idea of “investing in people.” We are pretty obsessed with finding charities that have good results, but many people (including our applicants, and including some of the friends I’m making overseas ), are urging me to put more focus on finding great people, and trusting them.

Here’s the thing: I love this idea. I am all for investing in great people. GiveWell wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for this phenomenon; in fact, nothing would exist, because you need to get past your startup phase before you can start demonstrating effectiveness. And there is a set of people I know that I would call confidently call “great people” (in the specific sense of competence – there are other people I like personally but wouldn’t trust to invest a coupon for 50% off peanut butter). Any of these great people could come up to me and say “I’m starting a charity” and already be 90% of the way to getting half or more of my charitable budget.

But here’s the other thing. None of these great people run charities; they all do something else. That isn’t a comment on the nonprofit sector, it just reflects that I’ve spent most of my life outside it. And, all of these people have impressed me through substantial interaction, and by showing themselves to be intelligent and capable in the things they do focus on. I can’t just dial up a “great person” in whatever area I want.

I can’t determine whether someone is a “great person” through a one-hour abstract conversation or a two-hour site visit. I can’t do it by looking up my friend’s friend’s friend’s friend’s friend, even if I use Facebook … there are only so many degrees out that I trust people’s opinions. (2.) By the same token, I definitely can’t conclude that someone’s a great person from their “reputation.” And even if I could do any of these things, why should donors who’ve never met me trust my assessment?

That leaves me with the other way of finding a great person: looking at what they’ve accomplished. That’s how I’ve come to think that Steve Jobs is great at what he does, and that Frank Thomas is great at what he does; that’s how I’ve identified all the great people I haven’t met. Not a perfect method, but not bad.

A lot of investing and donating comes through personal connections, and rightfully so. But the world is too big for all of it to work this way. Someone who is great at helping people, and is past the startup phase (as all our applicants are), will have evidence that s/he’s helped people. I might double-check my impression with a site visit; a relationship might develop eventually; but it seems fair to judge an executive starting with the organization they spend their life running, rather than the other way around.

What do you think? Any other ideas on how to integrate the “great person” test into our grantmaking?

Fundraisers seem to do a phenomenal job.

Somehow, you don’t see fundraisers making a lot of arguments that “Money spent on evaluation means less letters mailed out” or “Evaluation is difficult and you can never really isolate causality perfectly.” Instead, you see them testing. And testing. And testing. And learning things that are far from obvious. And testing again.

Maybe it’s because they’re the ones the nonprofits rely on to stay in business. Program, on the other hand, doesn’t have to be as good as it can be … unless we demand it.

All I was trying to say in the last post could be summed up like this:

This is an awesome literature review about early child care programs. It describes how the author found all the papers she discusses … it is totally straightforward about what the methodological strengths and weaknesses of each paper are … and, hold on to your seats – the tables on pages 218 and 223 can only be described as “rock star.” At a glance, you can see all the studies under discussion, who they looked at, how they looked, and what they found.

The literature review I discussed on Saturday is nothing of the sort. It’s unclear about study design, it makes broad claims whose support is unclear, and of course, there are no awesome tables.

If only people were as determined to take a tough look at microlending as they are at Head Start. But of course, Head Start is politics; it affects us all; it’s important; it’s difficult; it’s controversial; it needs to be argued about. Microlending is charity, so it’s none of those things. That all checks out, right?