It’s Grace with some advice on how to choose charities!
With so many problems in the world and so many different ways to help, how do we decide which causes and charities to support? Even if we had a substantial amount of time and/or money to dedicate, we simply can’t do it all. So we have to make the hard choices. Here are a few tips:
1. Donating when you feel “moved” could leave impact out of the equation.
Most people make choices about where — and where not — to donate. But often, donors aren't really aware they are making these choices.
Instead, people donate to the causes they happen to hear about — neglecting to think about what else their money could be accomplishing. While this might sound reasonable, thinking more consciously about the tradeoffs often results in your money doing a whole lot more.
This is because hearing about a cause that resonates doesn’t necessarily mean there are exceptional programs working on it. And even if there are, how do we identify the “exceptional” programs from the many other organisations working on the same problem?
Interestingly, the most popular causes often need funding less than other areas because they have a large supporter base already!
2. Think of effective giving as akin to triage in an emergency room.
Because there are so many problems that need solving, it’s important to use reasoning to find the areas where we’re most likely to make significant progress. Just as an emergency room doctor should treat appendicitis before a sprained wrist, it makes sense to focus on areas that affect a lot of people and/or affect them significantly. In other words, the first step is finding a high-impact cause area.
3. The sweet spot? A high-impact cause + a high-impact program
Once you've identified a high-impact cause that resonates with you, the next step is figuring out which programs within that cause area are doing the most!
Some charitable interventions do far more good per dollar than others. To continue with the medical analogy, if one medication is significantly cheaper for a patient than another, but they both do the same thing, most doctors will prescribe the cheaper medication.
Luckily, impact-focused charity evaluators do thousands of hours of research each year to identify particularly impactful programs in particularly high-impact cause areas and the reports are publicly available!
The bottom line?
Impact varies more than you might think.
“If you give $1,000 to an Extraordinary Charity, you can achieve more than someone who gives $90,000 to a Good Charity.”
(GiveWell is an organisation that leverages 50,000 hours of research each year with the goal of finding the charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar.)
Another key point is that it makes sense to think about a charity's effectiveness in terms of how much good it does per dollar donated rather than via other metrics like overhead spending. (Think about it: even if 100% of your donation goes directly to Program A, if Program A isn’t doing very much good, your money won’t be either!)
Following the research
Here are some resources we recommend to help you be confident that you’re making a tangible impact with your donations:
Even when we feel confident our donations are going to programs backed by strong evidence and reasoning, such as charities implementing interventions that have been well-studied through meta-analyses, randomised controlled trials, the works – it can be hard to truly internalise differences in impact.
Let’s continue to use global health as an example. Within this area, the most cost-effective charities are typically overseas, given we’ve eradicated many of the worst, preventable diseases in high-income countries, so it’s not like we can easily go visit the beneficiaries.
Yet supporting evidence-backed, life-saving interventions in global health is very often far more impactful than donating locally. One way to internalise its impact is through the following thought experiment:
A quick thought experiment
Imagine that you are in a restaurant and you see someone start to choke. For some reason, nobody else is acting – they are all just sitting there, continuing to enjoy their dinner. The person is gasping for breath and their face is turning red. You have a moment of panic but then spring into action – you run towards the person and start to perform CPR. Suddenly, the food is freed and the person can breathe again. Everyone is safe, and you’re a large part of why.
How would you feel? Pretty incredible, right? It might even be the single most meaningful day of your life.
While not an exact analogy, what you've done in this scenario is similar to what you do when you donate to a highly-effective charity providing life-saving interventions — except that donating is a lot easier than performing CPR. Thinking about it this way….is mindboggling.
Consider that just $5 donated to one of GiveWell's top charities buys a malaria net that could protect someone from getting the bite that could end their life.
So the impact of giving 10% of your income over your lifetime? That would be extraordinary.
Sure, giving is not the only way you can have an impact, and it doesn’t always address the root or systemic causes of suffering (though we think this concern may be overstated).
It's abundantly clear, though, that giving has an incredible amount of power to affect the lives of others — far more than most people think — provided you choose cost-effective charities that really work.
All my Best, Grace
P.S. Confused about the cost to save a life? GiveWell has calculated that around $5000 donated to one of the top charities identified by their research is enough to concretely save someone's life. This sometimes sounds high to people, given the low-cost of providing life-saving interventions like malaria nets, clean water, and essential nutrients. Many charities cite the low costs of the intervention as "what it costs to save a life" but fail to take into account all the other factors — for example, maybe the malaria net you provided protected someone from malaria, but that person wouldn't have actually died had they contracted the disease (though they surely would have suffered). Or perhaps not every malaria net purchased is used routinely. GiveWell takes into account all these uncertainties with their estimate, which is why it's higher than the actual cost of providing life-saving nets or nutrients.
Taking all this into account, for $200 a month, you can concretely save someone's life Every. Two. Years.
Many people spend this amount on a few Ubers & some nice meals out!
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