Trent Stamp says charity can never be cool. He appears to have history on his side, given (a) the number of powerful people who would love charity to be cool, and the amount of effort and the number of campaigns they’ve devoted to it; (b) the fact that charity isn’t cool, and has never been as far as I (the authority on these matters) know.

Is it a lost cause? I hope not, because it would be awesome if charity were cool. Imagine if people were as voluntarily, proactively, and obsessively interested in fighting diarrhea as they are in poker, fantasy football, Second Life, sudoku, or any of the kaschmillions of other dumb things that people spend ungodly amounts of time and money on. Why isn’t this happening? Can it ever happen?

Consider the following observations, backed by nothing except my supreme coolness:

• Things that are cool are generally controversial. It’s fun to be part of a group that opposes / makes fun of another group. Well, if you’re pro-charity, who are you against? No one, as long as charity is conventionally thought of as something that never involves any disagreement of any kind – the current attitude (and the attitude promoted by these campaigns) is that all charities are wonderful and that the more you give to any charity, the better. When’s the last time you heard someone slam a particular charitable cause? (This blog doesn’t count.) What “cool” things can you think of that you’ve never heard anyone slam?
• Hobbies and other obsessions generally have a competitive element. At the very least, they require some sort of skill beyond spending money (even fashion requires taste). Yet the conventional attitude in charity is that all donors are winners, end of story. If two people spend the same amount, there’s no consideration of who spent it better. Can you think of something people do for fun that works like that? I can’t.
• Hobbies are time-consuming. Of course, a large part of the reason people want to make charity cool is because they hope it will encourage people to spend more time on it. But … what is there to spend time on, as long as donating consists of writing a check?

Here’s something to chew on. I would say about half of the original eight members of GiveWell had never had much interest in charity before the project started. That includes me and Elie. We initially saw our research as a chore. But once we discovered that donating well takes brains, not just money, well … we love using our brains. Once we realized that there is such a thing as a bad donation decision, and we can criticize and argue with and oppose ourselves to those who make them … let’s admit it, that’s fun. Once we dropped the conventional notion of charity, and realized that we were doing something that takes hard work and smart thinking, our interest level went way up. Elie and I are now as addicted/obsessed as any poker player I know of. What no PR campaign has done for us, the realization that charity is something we can argue about has.

Unlike sports or fashion, this hobby is all about hard work and brains. It doesn’t involve our athletic abilities (thank God) or our sense of style (amen). So I’m not sure that our attitude has the potential to make charity specifically “cool.” But it does have the potential to make people spend time and effort in a way that they hadn’t before. In other words, I think our attitude toward giving can make it possible to be a charity geek … and that’s not a bad start.

The next few weeks will be hectic for me and GiveWell. Today, I don’t have time for a post, but I promise you one by midnight (EST) tomorrow.

Do any charities know what they’re doing?

We think so. In fact, we’re banking on it. GiveWell’s mission is to help steer capital and foster dialogue, and that’s it. We plan to give grants the same way we’ve given our personal donations: look for charities that already have proven, effective, scalable ways of helping people – charities that already know what they’re doing – and give them money. No consulting, no expertise, no program development, and no restrictions. Money.

For-profit sector readers are probably bored right now and wondering whether I’m going to say anything, but I bet the same isn’t true of nonprofit sector readers. From everything I’ve seen, our model of grantmaking is the exception, not the rule. Foundations don’t fund charities, they fund projects; they design programs and agendas, then look for organizations that fit into them; they design project-specific budgets, then make sure each of “their” dollars goes where it’s supposed to.

Part of it may be that foundations consider themselves experts in their fields, and they think they know more than the charities they fund. And they might be right … but that isn’t how we think of ourselves. We have a lot of options, so we demand a ton of information from charities, and we demand that they engage our questions and suggestions intelligently – but in the end, they know way more about their work than we do, and they should be the ones to decide how they do it. The donor’s role is to fund it.

It seems clear to me that this is would be a disastrous strategy if we didn’t pick our charities carefully. Hey – that’s exactly how it works today, with the lion’s share of charitable capital coming from people who have no access to good information (though at least they can get irrelevant financial data and nonsensical metrics).

But imagine if we actually put in the due diligence, and find the charities that already have smart, experienced, passionate people with proven, effective, scalable methods for helping people. Imagine if we find the organizations that have it all except money. At that point, it’s moot how much of our dollar is going to “overhead,” or anything else – sometimes overhead is necessary and sometimes it isn’t, and good people will make those decisions better than we can. At that point, it’s unnecessary for us to “keep the charities in line,” because they’ll keep themselves in line or lose next time around. Accountability, transparency, and competition are harsher taskmasters than any contract can be.

When we find what we’re looking for, we’re looking at an alley-oop … all we have to do is throw them the ball. That’s going to be easier and more effective than doing the driving ourselves.

Disclaimer: GiveWell failed to be named as one of NetSquared’s featured projects. Therefore, if you are incapable of making your own judgments about what you read (based on content rather than author), you should assume that the blog post that follows is just me being “bitter,” and you should load a reputable news site immediately before you read something dangerous. Those who are comfortable differentiating reasonable from unreasonable, feel free to proceed.

As of last Wednesday at ~8pm est,

• NetSquared had recently closed its online balloting to choose the featured projects for its upcoming conference.
• Many concerns had been expressed over the completely open online ballot.
• No one knew yet who had voted, how many people had voted, or how many votes were based in any way on content of proposals (as opposed to emails from friends).
• No one knew which projects had won yet.
• No one knew anything about the projects themselves, beyond what was written up briefly in their proposals.
• There had been close to zero substantive discussion of the proposals.

And here was what people were saying about it:

• Phil proclaimed the vote a “watershed event for democracy.”
• I eagerly anticipated other blogs’ making fun of him for jumping the gun. Phil is a good and thought-provoking writer who is not always what we would call “reserved” in tone.
• Lucy agreed with Phil.
• So did the normally reserved Sean.
• In the wake of criticism, Sean insisted that “NetSquared is already a success” – not because of its voting process (the original thing that had set off Phil), but because the projects that are going to be featured are “great.” (Keep in mind that the sum total of our knowledge on these projects still consists of ~1000 words submitted by their leaders.)

To be clear, I think NetSquared is an exciting idea. But where I come from, people celebrate a new client the day the client signs, not the day they decide to call the client and see if they’re interested. “Great research projects” refers to ideas that have been studied and stress-tested to death and produced returns, not to the ideas we had in this morning’s meeting. So as I’ve made clear, I’ve been pretty surprised by the extent to which people have called paragraphs on a screen “great projects,” and pointed to a “success” and “watershed event” where I saw an online poll that hadn’t even been tallied yet.

And while I can only speak to what I’ve seen, this doesn’t strike me as an isolated incident. The charities I’ve examined constantly use the word “success” to refer to mosquito nets purchased or children enrolled in an after-school program, or even in many cases simply dollars spent or plans made. Much of the literature I’ve read on grantmaking tells stories of “great grantmaking,” stories that end with the funds disbursed. Call me crazy, but for a humanitarian charity I associate “success” with “lives changed.”

Sure, that’s hard to measure. Yes, many of the things we celebrate in the for-profit sector are more concrete. But this post isn’t about the process of evaluation (I’ve written plenty about that, and will write plenty more); it’s about the mentality. When you’re used to seeing the results of your actions, you’re used to the world’s working much less smoothly than your imagination does. You assume a huge chasm between a great idea and a great result. You put the bar for “success” a lot higher, and that pushes you to get a lot better. I wish I saw more of this mentality from the sector whose job it is to bring about the world’s most important (and often most difficult) changes.