Of the money moved to our top charities through our website in 2010, 25% was on December 31st alone. We know that lots of people will be looking to make last-minute donations.

If you only have five minutes but you want to take advantage of the thousands of hours of work we put into finding the best giving opportunities, consider giving to our top charities. They have strong track records, accomplish a lot of good per dollar spent, and have good concrete plans for how to use additional donations.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

• After you give, spread the word. This is the perfect time to remind people (via Facebook sharing, tweeting, etc.) to give before the year ends. And people making last-minute gifts are likely to be receptive to suggestions.
• If you have any questions, we’re here to help. We should be available by phone for most of the day, and responding to email when we’re not. (See our contact page). Our research FAQ may also be a good resource.

Elie recently highlighted his doubts about our top charities, and a commenter responded:

Of course one ultimately never knows how much good a charity or any given donation will do. Bednets might end up saving the life of child who grows up to be the next Nelson Mandela – or the next Saddam Hussein. Everything we do is a gamble, but I’d like to make the best ones I can. These two charities look like good gambles.

I agree completely, but I’m still glad Elie emphasized these risks. Because in one specific way, supporting our top charities is riskier than supporting any other charity: if something goes wrong with one of our top charities, it will come out promptly and publicly.

There’s no question that “giving a goat” has caught on, as a way of getting people to support charity – rather than consumer goods – for the holidays.

I certainly don’t need an iPad or a new TV, and I encourage friends and family to make donations in my name rather than sending me gifts. However, I’d rather not get a “goat” because:

• I’d have unanswered questions about the effects this gift might have. Will the person who receives the goat be well-suited to receive it? Will they mistreat the goat? Will the goat produce enough to justify their investment in it? Will the local community perceive unfairness in who is chosen to receive the goat?We’ve found livestock-gift programs to be among the more poorly documented developing-world aid programs out there. We have little sense of whether and when these concerns apply.
• The model of giving out goats fundamentally doesn’t make much sense to me. We wrote in 2009 that giving out livestock seems to have the same challenges as giving out cash, plus additional challenges. This isn’t to say that it’s never a good idea. But supporting a model with such fundamental questions would make me uneasy unless I saw those questions being addressed in an intelligent, context-specific way. (Note that there is a charity giving out cash.)
• It’s not really a goat anyway. See our 2009 discussion of donor illusions: chances are, the fine print says you’re really just giving a donation to the charity, not any specific goat. Matching your dollars with a specific goat doesn’t (in our view) really make sense logistically, so we’re glad that it isn’t actually happening.
• I think there are much better ways to help people with donations. This is the most important point for me. Maybe “giving a goat” really does help people – but I don’t believe it helps them as much as possible given our other options. GiveWell’s top charities carry out proven, cost-effective interventions; they have strong track records; they have better transparency and accountability than any livestock-focused programs I know of. They can generate incredible value for your money, such as saving a life for $2000 or keeping someone worm-free throughout childhood for $5. Those are our best evidence-based estimates (the details are all online), not marketing pitches.
• Giving a goat means supporting the best story for donors, not the best solution for the people I want to help. If you agree that there are better ways to help people than “give a goat,” you should be worried about the message you send when you opt for the latter. To me, the whole point of “giving to charity for the holidays” is to take the focus off of our own wants and put it on helping people who have much more fundamental needs. This goal is cheapened if we support any charities other than the best we can find.

We like the idea of giving to charity in someone’s name as a gift for the holidays. We’ve recently made this possible for our top charities. We just think these gifts should be made to the best charities possible.

My favorite cause used to be U.S. equality of opportunity. But over the years since we started GiveWell, I’ve become more and more convinced that the best giving opportunities for individual donors lie in the area of global health and nutrition.

Fundamentally, this area stands out because it involves a lot of interventions that have measurable, demonstrable, quantifiable benefits, yet also haven’t been funded to reach everyone who can benefit from them. (See our list.) It’s the only aid area I know of fitting this description. This has made charities working in this area a good fit for our criteria.

One might retort that this just shows our criteria to have the problem of focusing on what can be measured, rather than on what’s best, but I would disagree. I think that there are good reasons to believe that the cause of global health and nutrition really does contain the best – and not just the most easily understood – giving opportunities.

• Global health and nutrition interventions have the most impressive track record in international aid, with the possible exception of funding scientific research. I believe (though we are still investigating this) that the same holds for aid in general. To some extent this may be an artifact of how measurable the goals are, but it’s still a point in this cause’s favor.
• Global health and nutrition interventions are incredibly cheap on a per-person basis. We don’t have “cost per life saved” type figures for any programs outside of health, largely because the effects of these programs aren’t well-known enough. But consider that
  • An insecticide-treated net costs under $6, and a deworming treatment costs around 50c – these figures include all shipping costs, administration costs, etc. By contrast, GiveDirectly’s cash transfers cost $500 per household per year; the promising Ultra Poor Graduation program appears to have similar costs (PDF, pg 3); educating a child, even in the poorest countries, costs $50+ (sometimes much more) per year (PDF pg 39); even in microfinance, $12-17 per year is spent in grants alone for each current person who is served by microfinance. Programs that don’t target the poorest of the poor – such as U.S. programs – cost far more. These are far from apples-to-apples comparisons, but my intuition is that the health interventions compare favorably on “quality-of-life impact for the money.”
  • Speaking more informally, on our site visits it has struck me how lean health interventions often are. Because the evidence is so strong, people generally know exactly what has to be delivered, and how, in order to benefit people. This means they can design programs to deliver these crucial items and services with maximal efficiency. Other programs are much more intensive – again, for not clearly more life benefit. This observation makes the above point make more sense to me: health interventions are cheap because they are small and precisely defined but involve major known benefits.
• Health and nutrition programs are particularly good at having clear goals and accountability, leading to learning over time. Because benefits can be quantified and predicted, targets can be set, and adjustments can be made when they’re not met. We’ve been placing more emphasis on the criterion of accountability, i.e., the likelihood that giving will lead to learning. Health and nutrition interventions stand out in terms of the likelihood that giving will lead to learning.
• Room for more funding is relatively easy to gauge in the area of health and nutrition. We believe that one of the thorniest issues that a donor has to contend with is that of room for more funding. In an area like funding scientific research (which otherwise has much to recommend it as a charitable cause), it’s particularly hard to answer the question, “How does the value of the next study on the priority list – the one that no one else has funded and that my funding will make possible – compare to the value of the average study overall?” This isn’t nearly as much of an issue when delivering global health and nutrition interventions; the expected benefits of running an additional project tend to be easier to quantify.
• Health and nutrition are fundamental to quality of life. In my view, the value of additional education – or additional income – depends a lot on the context, but health and nutrition are fundamental and universal needs. In addition, with economic empowerment or education interventions, I tend to worry about the difficulty of distinguishing “zero-sum benefits” (helping some people at the expense of others) from “positive-sum benefits” – a well-intentioned business training or education program could end up simply transferring power/wealth from some people in a community to others, and this could be very difficult to distinguish from actually improving these people’s productivity. I feel this is much less of a concern when it comes to health and nutrition.

What problems are best suited to having money thrown at them?

I’m not arguing that health and nutrition are the most important issues in the world. There are many changes in the world that I’d like to see and that I believe are worth fighting for. There are many fantastic uses of money outside the sector of global health and nutrition; many involve taking risks on building institutions and producing public goods. But when thinking about how individual donors can do good, my mind jumps to the easiest ways to have impact without having special insight – the problems that are most likely to be solved by “throwing money at them.” When this is the goal, being able to measure, demonstrate and quantify one’s impact is enormously helpful.

According to our analysis, ~$5 can buy a bednet or 10 years of deworming – either of which will have a substantial, quantifiable, definite impact on quality of life. That can empower a person who is better positioned than you are to address many of their other problems. I believe that for a donor interested in making the world better just by writing a check, this sort of value-for-money may not be available in any other cause.