Last week, I shared my ideal vision for where we’re ultimately headed. Many of GiveWell’s biggest fans and supporters – including Jason – think it’s totally unrealistic. That’s OK. I’d be happy with about a hundred other possible chains of events, including:

1. Donors give directly to charities rather than through clear funds, but they still pay a lot of attention to what organizations such as ours recommend. Consequently, the GiveWell seal of approval (and others, in other sectors) becomes desirable enough that charities volunteer their information, and our job no longer requires nearly as much money or time. Thus, reviews can continue to happen despite smaller budgets; reviewers that do a bad job get ignored, while reviewers that do a good job have tremendous impact; end result, the question of how to donate is still a public and informed discussion. (Jason outlined something like this in his comment.)
2. Or, once donors start to demand the level of understanding we do, charities start voluntarily putting it on their own websites. At that point the role of a “watchdog” becomes much easier – verifying the claims that are made, rather than trying to figure out and assess what’s going on in the first place – and since all the information is easily available, all you need to have a dialogue about it is a discussion board. In that case, The Clear Fund would become completely unnecessary and obsolete.
3. Or, the Clear Fund begins to compete for fundraising dollars with United Ways, philanthropic advisors, and other “charitable money managers.” Once they see that our transparency makes us more trustworthy and thus more appealing, they open their own doors in order to compete. They do it better and blow us out of the water.
4. Or, existing foundations begin to make grants with the same transparency as The Clear Fund (whether because they realize it makes sense or because they’re pressured by public outrage with their locking their taxpayer-subsidized information behind a vault). They do our job better than we do and we get destroyed.

There are a lot of differences between these scenarios, including the continued role of The Clear Fund: it could become anything from a huge grantmaker to a lean-budget reviewer to a distant memory. That’s OK with me – as my past life decisions have shown, I place no premium on job security, and I’m ready to do whatever makes me most valuable, even if that eventually means bringing Bill Gates coffee.

But what these scenarios have in common is what’s important. Rather than a world in which the flow of money to charities has practically nothing to do with their ability to help people, we have a world in which the best ideas and approaches get the most funding. Rather than a world in which every attempt to make things better has to reinvent the wheel, there is a constant, global dialogue and debate over what works and what should be done next. Rather than throwing money at our problems, we solve them.

We’re not predicting or deciding anything we don’t have to. What we know is how much better the world would be if there were a public, thorough discussion of how to help people as well as possible. The first step in getting there is to find out as much as we can on the subject, and be the first people to share it. The Clear Fund is our best existing tactic for doing this, but the broader purpose of GiveWell is to get the information out in the open however we can, and get others to use it and add to it. That’s the only goal we’re wedded to.

Getting there won’t be easy. Our registration form for nonprofits includes a question asking how we can improve the form, and I’ve gotten a lot of useful feedback from it (which I’m incorporating as we speak), but I’ve also gotten some ludicrously enthusiastic praise for what is, in fact, a series of about 10 checkboxes.

I read a lot about the power imbalance between funders and funded, and how the funded can’t speak their minds. I believe this is a real problem, because in private, personal conversations, I hear all kinds of horrible things about large foundations – yet public criticism of them is unbelievably rare considering that they are (a) huge (b) constantly making controversial and debatable decisions that affect us all.

Maybe the Gates Foundation feels good about dodging criticism and maintaining a pretty squeaky-clean image. But that isn’t our goal; our goal is just to help the world as much as we can, and given how difficult that is, that means getting criticized. A lot. On our process, our decisions, our logo, you name it. The more feedback we get, the better we’ll be. I’m already brainstorming about all the ways I can induce our applicants to give constant, totally honest feedback about how we’re running the process and how we can do better. (Any ideas? Comment.) Mark my words: we’re going to catch a world-record amount of flak.

This seems like a good time to spell out my vision for how the nonprofit sector would ideally work (i.e., where we’re trying to help it get). This is important because a lot of people seem to think that we have a “hyperintellectual” idea of charity, and are hoping that all donors will eventually become charity nerds just like us – throwing emotion to the winds, and madly doing research before every donation. That isn’t the case. What I do picture is a world in which every tactical giving decision is publicly explained, and those who wish to can challenge it.

Part of every giving decision is an expression of personal values that will never be reconciled to others’. But when donors give, they aren’t just making these decisions – they’re also deciding on who can best accomplish their ends and how. They have to simultaneously figure out whether to improve education or fight disease (philosophical), whether to promote extracurricular activities or charter schools (tactical), and who runs the best charter schools (also tactical). That’s a lot to ask at once for someone who just wants to do their part in making the world a better place, and call it a Christmas.

Donors currently deal with this problem in one of two ways. Casual donors write a check essentially at random – usually by being passive and donating to whoever proactively reaches them. Serious donors may start to try figuring things out – but they have to start from scratch every time, since neither charities nor foundations publish thorough information on what works and what doesn’t (as we discuss at length in our business plan). And even serious donors don’t have time to really do all the necessary due diligence. It’s a full-time job, as we’ve discovered.

We aren’t trying to turn casual donors into serious donors, or serious donors into full-time program officers – we just want the three groups to help each other. To facilitate this, I picture a set of what I’ll call clear funds: organizations that pool money, make extremely large and extremely well-researched grants, and publicly publish everything they do. Different clear funds focus on different causes: ours will always be humanitarian-centric, but I hope to see not only direct competitors but also clear funds that focus on particular regions, religions, diseases, you name it. True charity nerds work for grantmakers, as they do now; serious donors pore over the different clear funds and carefully choose the best ones; and casual donors leverage serious donors’ opinions and comments to quickly pick good clear funds that line up with their values.

In this setup, everyone is putting in the amount of time they have to give – and using it in a way that is reasonable and realistic. Serious donors can’t reasonably evaluate charities – they can’t do that much due diligence – but they can read what clear funds come up with, and evaluate those clear funds’ ability to reason logically, explain themselves well, and (eventually) pick grantees that are able to get things done. And once they do, their opinions become worth something. Then, we can build all the great social networking tools in the world to help donors aggregate their opinions, find the recommendations of people who think like them, etc. Then, and only then, will personal recommendations and big-name endorsements indicate something other than flashy fundraising.

And what happens to personal choice under this scenario? Absolutely nothing. Donors still choose the causes that are most meaningful to them, which is the decision that was most personal in the first place; they leave the lower-level decisions to professionals, although those professionals remain accountable and criticizable by anyone who wants to poke around (a key missing piece now, as foundations don’t share anything that goes into their decisions).

Donors still support the causes that matter the most to them. Donors still use personal recommendations and referrals as essential parts of their decision-making. What’s new is that the final grants are far more concentrated, and far more carefully allocated; meanwhile, a debate rages in public that involves all of the world’s most interested minds. We don’t go from emotional to intellectual, but we go from throwing money at the world’s problems to putting our collective minds together – dividing up the labor by who has how much time – and solving them. That’s a huge change, and it isn’t one that has to take centuries. We have started the world’s first clear fund; here’s hoping others join us.

We need your help. We’re about to contact all the charities we’ve identified as being potential Clear Fund grant recipients. We’ve mostly found these organizations through a systematic search through a gigantic stack of Form 990s (let me know if you want more details – they’re fantastically boring), and have found a few others in one-off ways. We don’t want to miss anyone good. So If you know of a charity that would be great to donate to, now is the time to plug them.

What we’re looking for: broadly, we want organizations with proven, effective, scalable ways of helping people. That means they reliably can turn more money into more lives affected. Innovative and totally untested experiments, research organizations, etc. certainly have value to society – but that isn’t what we’re looking for. Ditto for small organizations where we can’t predict what would result from an influx of funding. Ditto for political advocacy. We want to buy better lives for others, as cheaply and confidently as we can.

More narrowly, for our first year, we are focusing on New York City and Africa. Global or national organizations are fine, if their scope includes these areas – we just don’t want to evaluate organizations who don’t do any work in the areas we’re going to be able to see in person. For New York City, we are looking for organizations that help children get better opportunities to succeed in life (whether through education, child care, or addressing basic needs) and that help adults get out of poverty for good (supportive housing, job training, etc.) For Africa, we are focusing more on reducing suffering: fighting disease, malnutrition, extreme poverty, etc.

As our regular readers know, we couldn’t possibly care less how much a charity spends on overhead or what watchdogs including Charity Navigator and the Better Business Bureau think of them. We want organizations that are great at helping people, no matter how good they are at accounting.

Finally, we’re looking for organizations that want to share what they do. Charities that are afraid to tell the unfiltered truth about their strategies, achievements and shortcomings (and let’s face it, there are always shortcomings) simply won’t get anywhere with us. I don’t care if Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Britney Spears and Mona Lisa have all given the thumbs up – we’re not spending money without an idea of what it’s going to buy.

I know I’ve been very vague and broad, and that’s because the goal is vague and broad: help people. We will ultimately divide charities up by category so they can be more reasonably compared to each other, and we will firm up our categories (already drafted) when we know how many interested charities are in each category. For now, we’re trying to cast the net wide. So hit me. Tell me who’s good.