As illustrated by this raging debate between me and two guys at GiftHub. (If you want to get straight to the metaphor-gone-awry goodness, Ctrl-F “life partner.”)

Meanwhile, talking to people about my video game analogy, I’ve realized the biggest problem with it relates to the role of enjoyment. Enjoyment is the ultimate goal of playing video games, but not of charity. That’s because video games are about pretending to do what charity REALLY does (kill bad guys). Charity is enjoyable even though (in fact because) enjoyment isn’t the point.

There really is just no possible analogy that can capture how awesome it is to be actually spending my time trying to kill bad guys. Nothing else is remotely comparable.

“How does helping people make you feel?” That’s what I’ve been asked, and my answer isn’t familiar from any publications on marketing or fundraising that I know of.

When I was younger, I loved playing video games. Single-player video games, without anyone watching. I didn’t get anything for my virtual accomplishments – not appreciation, or respect, or friendship. I didn’t even get the thrill of being good at something, because I knew that most of my friends were better than I was anyway. I didn’t think I was good at these games; I didn’t think I was building up any skill; in brief, I had no ulterior motives.

I just liked killing bad guys. Well, more than that, I hated not killing bad guys. When Heat Man killed my guy and stood around smugly, I wanted to throw the TV across the room, and I couldn’t stop until he was dead.

What sucked about this experience was that it was all fake, and in the back of my head I knew that. In the end I felt pretty empty and lame. Enter altruism – where the bad guys are ACTUALLY BAD GUYS. (See illustration.) Sure, I don’t get the same satisfying explosion when they die … I don’t even know to what extent, or whether, they die. So you can think of this video game as being more in the camp of something lame, like an RPG or something. But it’s infinitely better because it’s real. I don’t care whether the kids are cute, or whether the organizations are nice to me, or whether my friends like my decisions. As with video games, I probably spend 99% of my time frustrated rather than happy. But … Malaria Man just pisses me off. It’s that simple.

I’d call my attitude toward giving straight-up altruism. I’ve heard people deny that real altruism can possibly exist, but I don’t think any of them would challenge my description of playing Mega Man, even once I specify that it was the desired outcome, not the feelings, that kept me playing.

There are a couple key differences between my attitude and the motives I commonly hear ascribed to donors. One is the fact that I’m obsessed, and therefore I’m not looking for a pleasant minute-to-minute experience. Charities focus on making giving a pleasant, immediately rewarding experience for the donor, sometimes at the cost of being really truthful and helping the donor to understand; this is because they expect their donor to spend a few minutes, or hours at most. (And that’s all they’ll spend as long as there’s no clear outlet for using their brain as well as their checkbook.) Another key difference is that I’m not looking to feel validated or important or un-guilty or generally “good” in any warm and fuzzy way; I’m looking to actually kill the bad guy, not just prove to myself that I tried. No matter how it makes me feel, a charity is failing me if it doesn’t get results.

I find most of the motivations that marketers attribute to donors irrelevant. Gaining appreciation, recognition, a legacy, a warm and fuzzy feeling, an ego boost, a thank-you note, a friend – I don’t give a crap about any of it.

A great illustration of what does drive me to give was written today, by an Ohio State fan. I have the same relationship to malaria and diarrhea – and generally, to the problems a species this brilliant and productive still hasn’t solved – that he has to Florida.

We’ve been accused many times (including here and here) of trying to take the emotion out of charity. That doesn’t make any sense to me – I can’t think of any reason to do charity other than emotion (call me crazy, but I’ve found that disobeying the Categorical Imperative doesn’t bother me).

It is true that we want to use logic, math, statistics, estimation, judgment, and every other tool at our disposal, to figure out which charities are actually accomplishing the most good, and it is true that we distrust glossy brochures with heart-rending pictures. That must be where the argument comes from: “Imagine,” says the Straw Man, “that you are considering two charities – one which is shown by charts and statistics to save 5 lives per $100, and another that sends you pictures of the 4 adorable, suffering children your $100 will save. Which would you choose?”

Well, Mr. Straw Man, let me put a question to you. Think of someone you deeply love and care about – your child probably works best for this analogy, but it can also be your significant other or just someone who is wikkid cool. Imagine that this person is demonstrating worrisome physical symptoms. Imagine that a doctor sits you down and shows you charts and statistics that suggest to you, strongly, that this person will die unless she takes her prescribed medicine. But the person you love doesn’t agree with the analysis, and doesn’t want to take the medicine. When you ask the person to take it, she gets angry and hostile; when you force her to take it, she cries.

So you’ve got your two pieces of evidence: the crying, suffering, and emotions of the one you love, vs. the dry charts and statistics that show you how to save her life. Which one do you trust? EASY. YOU GET YOUR LOVED ONE TO TAKE THE MEDICINE, EVEN IF IT MEANS CLUBBING HER OVER THE HEAD AND SHOVING IT DOWN HER THROAT. YOU KNOW IT.

It’s when we really care that we find ourselves trusting our brains.

We’ve written a heck of a lot about what “measurements” should and shouldn’t be applied to charitable work – that’s what we spend a lot of our time thinking about, seeing as how we’re trying to figure out where to donate and all. Here’s a roundup of what we think. It’s a long post, but there’s candy for you: we offer up our actual, defined, concrete metrics for you to look at and think about, rather than sticking to abstract thoughts about whether you can quantify philanthropy (as I predict most others will).

First, though, the abstract stuff. Like many others, we are concerned about the point where measurement tries to do too much. Improving people’s lives is complex and difficult; you can never really be sure of what you’re accomplishing; and there are philosophical decisions to be made as well. An overambitious metric risks a conclusion like “Building a new charter school in New York City has a GORP (Good over RePlacement) of 17.3, whereas distributing medication to those with AIDS in Africa has a GORP of 18.5 – I think it’s pretty obvious where to donate, no?” More on this pitfall (which we’ve seen a lot of) here.

We also hate metrics that do too little. I’m constantly amazed at the way people will accept any ranking that someone cares to throw together, regardless of whether it makes any sense whatsoever (see the U.S. News and World Report rankings of just about anything, as well as this flagrant violation of common sense that didn’t so much as give me an honorable mention). The charity version of this is what we call the Straw Ratio, a seductively easy-to-calculate metric that is roughly as helpful in deciding between the best charities as this link is. I’ve written no less than 10 posts on why this metric, featured by Charity Navigator among others, is the worst thing since, uh, unsliced bread.

But to let the matter end there is unacceptable. There are too many options, and there is too much at stake, to throw up our hands, as I argued here. Metrics can’t do everything, but they have too much to offer for us to abandon them. We need to figure out what our goal is in donating, and measure what we can. So, enough generalizations. If we had all the information, the following would be our ultimate measures of charities within each of our seven areas of focus.

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Ideal metricsCauses 1-3: aid the poorest of the poor, focusing on Africa.
Cause 1: Provide for basic human needs including basic health care, food, water, and shelter.
Ideal metric: number of people for whom all such basic needs are met, and wouldn’t have been met without the charity’s activities, per dollar per year.
Cause 2: Fight epidemic curable/treatable diseases, including malaria, diarrhea, tuberculosis, AIDS, measles, and pneumonia.
Ideal metric: number of people who are alive and functioning, but would have been killed or debilitated without the charity’s activities, per dollar per year.
Cause 3: Enable economic opportunity through microcredit, job assistance and training, and education.
Ideal metric: number of people whose jobs produce the income necessary to give them and their families a relatively comfortable lifestyle (including health, nourishment, relatively clean and comfortable shelter, and some leisure time), but would have been unemployed or working completely non-sustaining jobs without the charity’s activities, per dollar per year. (Systematic differences in family size would complicate this.)
Causes 4-7: remove barriers to opportunity in wealthy societies, focusing on New York City.
Cause 4: Provide for basic human needs including basic health care, food, and shelter.
Ideal metric: number of people for whom all such basic needs are met, and wouldn’t have been met without the charity’s activities, per dollar per year. Note that this cause remains philosophically distinct from Cause 1, because living like this in the developed world is a fundamentally different experience – and means different things to different donors – relative to living like this in the developing world.
Cause 5: Aid youth development (pre-high school) through after-school activities, child care programs, etc.
Ideal metric: number of children who enter high school with normal levels of learning abilities and mental health, but wouldn’t have without the charity’s activities, per dollar per year.
Cause 6: Improve educational opportunities at the high school level through charter schools, summer schools, and public school reform.
Ideal metric: number of children who graduate from high school well equipped for college (as demonstrated by later college grades), but wouldn’t have done so without this charity’s activities, per dollar per year.
Cause 7: Enable economic opportunity through microcredit, job assistance and training.
Ideal metric: number of people whose jobs produce the income necessary to give them and their families a relatively comfortable lifestyle (including health, nourishment, relatively clean and comfortable shelter, some leisure time, and some room in the budget for luxuries), but would have been unemployed or working completely non-sustaining jobs without the charity’s activities, per dollar per year. (Systematic differences in family size would complicate this.)

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OK. On one hand …

I think these metrics rock. There is a “click” for me when I read them – “Yeah, that’s what I want out of this charity! Yeah, that matches with common sense! That’s right – if Group A and Group B are both doing microfinance, and if it can actually be shown [forget for the moment that it can’t be] that $1000 leads to 3 sustainably employed people through A and only 2 through B, I feel good about donating to A!” This quality in a metric is far from given, and I think the key is making sure that everything is measured in people fully served. We make no attempt to make a conversion factor between someone whose life improves a little and someone whose life improves a lot – that factor would be arbitrary and would lead to numbers that don’t have clear meaning. Instead, when we start having to decide between fundamentally different ways of improving people’s lives, we stop comparing charities. This way, we can measure everything in terms of people, not any abstraction.

And I think it’s cool and useful to have these metrics. They help to focus our thoughts, when we’re trying to evaluate charities, and the fact that they’re well-defined may explain why we tend to have a more detailed idea of what we want than other donors do. We know that when we’re talking to a microfinance organization, it isn’t enough to see $ loaned – we know we need to know how many loans were made, how many were paid back, and (if possible) what ultimately happened to the borrowers; and we know how to weight these things and combine them into a sense of what ultimately got accomplished. So, go us.

On the other hand … we’ll never actually calculate a single one of these things.

Oh, we might estimate them, very, very loosely. We never have yet, because we’ve never even been in the ballpark of enough information and certainty. When we’re looking at public school reform, for example, it’s huge just to see that a program made any impact. Calculating how many lives were changed is a dream.

Once you start actually looking at charities’ specific activities, you find that there are no more generalizations to be made on this topic. We know what we’re aiming for (the metrics above), but what information actually ends up being relevant is completely case-specific. There’s no way to go about it except by combining analysis with judgment, common sense, intuition, and improvisation.

So, we welcome comments on our metrics and we continue to think about them, but we are also wary of hyperfocusing on them. We think that people who hyperfocus on metrics are putting too much faith in numbers and experts. Nobody will ever know for sure how many people they’re helping, and the estimation involves literally hundreds of judgment calls that no degree can qualify anyone to make. That’s why we want to put the focus squarely on blowing up the black box. We seek to be the first people ever – including any advisor or foundation you like – to publicly share everything that goes into our giving decisions. We think that’s the most valuable thing you could ever have in an evaluator.

I’ve done an arguably excessive amount of ranting on what I’ve dubbed the “Straw Ratio”: the idea that we can find the best charities by seeing what percentage of their total expenses goes to program expenses, or, in Straw Man parlance, goes “straight to the people who need it.” It’s about time for me to stop devoting every post to this, but before I do, I want to wrap up with why I’m so obsessed with this issue.

To me, the Straw Ratio is more than a bad metric: it’s an emblem of the biggest single problem with charitable giving today. The problem is the fallacy – specific to charity – that how much you spend is more important than how you spend it. That, in the end, is the fallacy behind the Straw Ratio: that what matters about a donation is not what it pays for, but how much it pays for.

It’s the same problem that sits behind the success of “microcharity” sites such as DonorsChoose and GlobalGiving and Kiva, which I will complain about more later – the attitude that getting your money straight to where it’s needed, bypassing administration and planning, is an exciting and intelligent way to give it.

It’s the same problem that sits behind some of the excessive restriction/designation of donations, both by individuals and foundations, which I will also complain more about later. Too many donors feel that if “someone else” pays for all the planning, evaluating, and administration (or if they simply aren’t paid for at all?), they’ve gotten more bang for their buck.

It might be the same problem that makes charities so reluctant to embrace transparency and admit that not everything they do is perfect – the obvious benefits of global dialogue, in terms of figuring out how to spend money, are offset by a fear that there will be less money to spend.

And in the end, it is probably the same problem that explains why donors are not smart about their giving, and nobody aside from GiveWell seems interested in helping them to become more so. From the (RED) campaign to the “Don’t Almost Give” campaign to, well, everything, “being charitable” is identified with “giving a lot.” The nonprofit sector is naturally obsessed with getting people to give more, and donors think that the only thing that determines how good you are at giving is how wealthy you are. That’s wrong.

The world’s needy don’t just need your dollars, they need your thoughts. If your friend gives more than you but gives it worse, this is pretty much the equivalent of their having a vastly superior tennis racket and being a vastly inferior tennis player. You are better. Why does that make so much sense in every context except charity, but sound so foreign here?

In all, I can think of a whopping two activities where money alone will buy you success. 1. Arcade games (the ones where you can continue as long as you have more quarters). 2. Strip clubs. Nothing else comes to mind.

Money can’t buy you a great movie. Money can’t buy you a great product. Money can’t buy you love. It can’t buy you a better world either.

Anyone who has ever had a job knows that throwing money at a problem is worthless, and that a single great idea can dwarf the impact of a bigger budget. Anyone who has ever watched a tiny startup business take down a Goliath knows the same thing. Anyone who has ever had a hobby knows that how much you spend is going to account for half, at most, of how good you are.

Anyone who has ever had 5 minutes of consciousness knows that intelligent thoughts are gold, and that next to them, money is cheap. So next time you give, expect your donation to help pay for salaries and self-evaluations. And when it comes to choosing where to donate, don’t use the Forbes list or the first slickster who sends you a picture of a baby. Put in some time, and donate some of your own intelligence as well. The world needs it.