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Larissa Hesketh-Rowe

A huge thank you to all of our members for all of your contributions to our recent pledge campaign which has seen 318 new members join Giving What We Can. This blog post gives some information on what to do next if you are a new member.

Welcoming over 318 new members to the Giving What We Can community

Happy 2017! We’re probably a bit late to say that but so much has happened in January already that it seems to have raced by.

 which saw 318 new members join Giving What We Can and 114 start Try Giving. This took us to 2575 new members by the end of the pledge campaign but today we're already on 2,629 members! A big welcome to all the people who are new to our community.

This has been our best campaign yet, December was a record breaking month with 171 new members joining in that time and yet this month we’ve already had 190 new members take the pledge. The image above (a huge thanks to volunteer José for designing it) is based on our dashboard data (see the graph below), the spike at the very end shows December and January, our recent pledge campaign.

We’re really excited to see our community growing so quickly. Together we’ve already donated over $20 million to highly effective charities which is a staggering amount. In 2015, (the most recent year for which we’ve conducted our full giving review) members recorded over $1.3 million just to the 

 this could have prevented as many as 425 premature deaths from malaria!

Most commonly our new members from the pledge campaign noted that they first heard about Giving What We Can from their friends which is a great testament to all of our current members who have been spreading the word. Thank you so much for supporting us and encouraging others to give more and give more effectively. These extra donations mean more children safe from malaria, better quality of life for people suffering from various neglected tropical diseases, less animals suffering in factory farming and more progress on preventing existential risks. This is what our work is all about. If you’d like tips on talking to your friends about Giving What We Can we have lots of resources and ideas on 

It’s been fun being involved in such a lively and creative campaign but now our focus is getting to know our new members better and working out how to support them.

If you are new, there a few important things you can do now.

Now that you’ve pledged to give 10% of your income (or 1% of your spending money while you’re a student or unemployed) to the organisations that can most effectively use it to improve the lives of others, it’s good to get into the habit of giving early. If it is financially viable for you, consider setting up a direct debit to a charity to come out of your account just after your pay cheque, that way it’s easier to budget and you won’t forget.

If you’re unsure about where to donate have a look at 

 to find top organisations that are working the most promising areas.

You can also make your donations go further by finding out about things like tax deductibility for charitable donations in your country. We've written up some 

If you have any questions please feel free to 

We ask all of our members to record their donations in 

. This helps you see what your money is achieving and whether or not you’ve met your pledge for the year. This is our main source of data for assessing the impact we and our members are having so it’s really important we get as much information as possible.

We are all trying to do the most good we can by donating a significant portion of our income to effective organisations. This means we’re part of a growing community all working towards a similar goal. If you need help with something, have questions or want moral support you have a community of over 2,600 Giving What We Can members to draw on, not to mention over 30,000 people who’ve signed up to the Effective Altruism newsletter because they want to improve the world. A few of us from the Centre for Effective Altruism (which runs Giving What We Can) will also be in touch with new members about chatting on Skype. If you’re already a member and haven’t spoken to one of us feel free to request a Skype by emailing 

Join the Giving What We Can community group on Facebook

 to stay up to date on developments in research and from the community.

Class of the pledge campaign 2016/2017: a community support experiment

One thing we also trialling to help support and connect our members is setting up cohorts for our new members by join date. This means giving you an online space where you can talk to people who joined at the same time as you, swap tips on things like giving and budgeting and share experiences of being a new member. We’ll also post information to help new members with getting started. Things like where to donate, how often and how to budget.

We’re trying this out with everyone who joined during the pledge drive (Tuesday 29th November - Tuesday 10th January) so if you joined Giving What We Can in this time and haven’t received your invite 

If this group finds it useful we’ll consider creating Facebook groups for cohorts of future new members so there is always somewhere to go for introductory resources when you join.

A huge thank you again to everyone who has been involved in our pledge campaign and to those of you who have newly joined because you want to use your donations to improve the world as much as possible. We are regularly humbled by this community and look forward to hitting the next milestones (3,000 members isn’t far away!) together.

Erwan Atcheson

It's Good to Talk

A five-minute conversation has the potential to prevent 40 lives being lost. That's about how long it takes to explain the basic precepts of the 

"I give 10% of my income to charities like 

; they use that money in cost-effective ways to prevent (e.g.) malaria in children; if I do that for every year of my working life, then on an average wage I can expect to avert 40 deaths."

That takes about 30 seconds to say out loud. Explaining the meaning of 

 can take another minute; explaining how charities are 

 you'll avert 40 deaths, one more minute.

Another minute should be spent explaining that rather than ‘averting 40 deaths’ you'd expect, on a 

 or US wage, to donate enough to buy 55,200 bednets, contributing to the protection of about 99,340 people and averting the deaths of about 70 children over the course of your working life and that there is considerable uncertainty in each figure, but the bottom line is that this is the best-evidenced, most-likely-to-be-highly-effective-and-do-the-most-good intervention your money can buy that we know of.

 does a wonderful job of explaining how to accurately tell someone exactly how their donation will do the good it does. In this article I am going to abbreviate the truth by saying I expect to avert about 40 deaths in my lifetime.

Ok, now we've up to four and half minutes, which allows time for questions. After this your friend may well take the pledge: 22% of pledge-takers do so after encountering the idea from their friends.

Even with the above qualifications and explications, it is an extraordinary fact: simply opening your mouth and talking could 

Here's the rub: talking about the pledge, or about Giving What We Can generally, can be difficult. There seem to be two main barriers. First, we're inhibited, and in fact there are lots of good reasons to be. I think the reasons to become 

 are a lot more compelling, but first we're going to have to look square at those reasons for being inhibited and deal with them. After that I'll breach the second barrier: even if we're keen to talk, it can be difficult to know what to say.

I'll share with you now what may be some reasons for being inhibited. Be warned that this will be somewhat subjective, as I have gone within, as it were, to locate these thoughts; but I'm not 

 weird (at least on a universal scale) so possibly you will find that something resonates.

One source of inhibition may be a concern not to use your friends as means to an end. It is one of the basic conditions of friendship that we don't use our friends to achieve things that aren't necessarily in their interest. People who do so are called users and are universally reviled. Talking about GWWC could be discerned as "using" your friend since it isn't necessarily in their best interest to learn they can do more good giving their money away than by keeping it. The impression is that people in some remote place will benefit at your friend's expense, with their new bednets or deworming tablets; you in turn will feel good, again at your friend's expense; so that makes you, in the short term, a user, because you are burdening your friend to achieve some other goal.

This aspect of burdening your friend is another source of inhibition, I think. There is good evidence that, long term, giving 10% of your income to charity 

; in fact it is likely to increase her happiness because making a genuine difference in the world (and knowing it) feels good, and we can prove that, as you can watch below. But short-term this information about effective giving is sometimes hard to hear, especially if you don’t bring up the subject in a sensitive way.

In the worst case, talking about effective giving can raise feelings of guilt, an unwelcome sense of privilege, a sense of pressure to live up to high standards. Ignorance is bliss; it can't be evaded that you your friend might not want to hear about GWWC. It may be outweighed, morally speaking, by the potential feelings of accomplishment and pride later should they pledge. But remember, they may not pledge. I'll come back to this concern about making your friends uncomfortable later.

Another source of inhibition may be the desire not to appear superior to your friends: "I give 10% of my money to effective charities. What do 

 do?" If friendship is fundamentally predicated on equality then by being a member of Giving What We Can you may be upsetting that balance by doing overwhelmingly more good for others than they do. Nobody wants their friends to think they’re smug or boastful. I'll come back to this too.

The final problem may be the passion many of us feel about effective giving. Expressing passion can be awkward. Generally it is thought best not to discuss religion or politics and GWWC has something of the flavour of a religion in that pledging is often motivated by the same strong feelings of universal love and a belief in the possibility of salvation. At a party, religious fervour and starry-eyed passion is not everyone's favourite cocktail.

Those are the problems, as far as I can tell. What can be done? It could be argued – but I'm not going to – that even if you are making your friends initially uncomfortable in telling them about the pledge, and causing yourself some unpleasant awkwardness, this is vastly outweighed by the good you are doing by potentially 

. Much as there may be weight to this argument, I don't want to start treating my friends in a utilitarian way, though I like 

 to be utilitarian however. All the above inhibitions are trumped by a more fundamental predicate of friendship: honesty. You can't have a good friendship if you hide your true beliefs or feelings, including about effective giving. Friends share things with each other; if there is something you strongly believe in, 

That's fine then. And how do you avoid appearing superior? Well, simply because you aren't. You simply have beliefs, which by that token are as worthy of presumptive validity and as worthy of discussion as anyone else's. One of the main strengths of effective altruism is it’s non-dogmatism; everything we do is evidence-based, and we’re aware of the fact that there isn’t really any absolutely 100% concrete way to rank charities so we’re open to any new ideas. Drawing on that non-dogmatic character allows us to bring due humility with us into any discussion about pledging.

Thus you are now completely de-inhibited (and even if you aren't the line I've followed here should generally help: go into yourself, analyse your own grounds for being inhibited, and evaluate them. If you see they are without good reason they should go.)

So, let's say you are now completely de-inhibited and want to talk about the pledge. What's next? What do you say?

It's not so difficult. We like to talk about what we do. So if you are reading a book or blog about effective altruism, or have gone to a stimulating GWWC talk, or have done some fundraising for the 

, or done volunteer work with a local chapter, all of these worthy subjects can be answers to the question, 'What've you been up to?' (I advise you to practice saying "schistosomiasis” - it’s “SHIST-oh-so-MY-ass-iss”, if you’re wondering). I find myself talking about effective giving and pledging when people bring up the subject of charity, which people do surprisingly often; and people seem to appreciate my input, because it is apposite. It is a question of recognising the cues and opportunities when they arise. This is easy to do once you start watching for them.

Once the conversation starts, focus on the positive. Present donating as an opportunity rather than an obligation; reveal that giving is a source of much happiness to you; emphasise how 

 the good charities are and don't waste breath describing the dreadfulness of the so-called "bad" ones (remember that half of what Giving What We Can does is tries to persuade people to give at all, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, any giving is better than none).

Listen, since the best conversations are usually not monologues. Do your best to raise and discuss views antithetical to your own. Refrain from ranting, cajoling, pressuring and pontificating. And if you are bringing too much passion to the table? Then go ahead and express that passion. Ignore what I said earlier. Life is too interesting to be expressed in monotone. Do all these things and everyone will be happy.

This is but a brief resumé. There are a large amount of resources 

 on how to approach the conversation, including what to say should your friends balk at the magnitude of giving 10%. I recommend checking them out.

In summary: tell your friends about Giving What We Can. They will thank you for it. Your friends are interested in what interests you. In a spirit of openness, honesty and general good-naturedness, reveal to them that remarkable fact: we're capable of radically altering the lives of others for the better. A fine thing to know and a fine secret to let other people in on.

Marinella Capriati

How we talk about what donations will achieve

When we talk about charities, we often use numbers, since we want to give a concrete idea of how cost-effective a charity is (because our charities are some of the most cost-effective in the world!). On our website, for example, we say that it costs $3,500 to avert a child’s death through “interventions supported by AMF” and $1.26 to treat a child through “interventions supported by SCI”. But why use such convoluted language?

There is a reason why we don’t just say “AMF averts a death for $3,500” or “SCI treats a child for $1.26”, and that’s the fact that our charities are not the same as the interventions they’re part of. They’re actually often a part of a chain of actions which lead to, for example, one child being treated for schistosomiasis for every 

 spent along the way or one death being averted for every 

It’s important to say that we think that having charities work in this way (performing small tasks rather than the whole intervention) is often a good idea: it means that charities can easily plug gaps that can occur in large-scale interventions.

To demonstrate the difference between a charity and its related intervention, take the 

, one of Giving What We Can’s two Top Charities. The intervention AMF works on is bed net distribution: providing long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets to people in developing countries to help fight malaria. Specifically, AMF buys nets, delivers them to local partners in those countries and supports the monitoring and evaluation that comes after the delivery of the nets, in order to make sure they’re being used correctly. There are parts of the overall bed net providing process that AMF does not do: it does not distribute the nets to individuals, and it does not conduct the surveys needed beforehand in order to tailor each net delivery to each region. That’s done (and paid for) by AMF’s local partners.

For another example, take Giving What We Can’s other Top Charity, the 

. It works on the overall intervention of providing de-worming treatments, and it does that very specifically by providing the technical support needed for the government distribution of the drugs needed. Pharmaceutical companies produce and donate those drugs; again, SCI is part of a chain.

Cost-effectiveness of the overall intervention

Since our charities only perform one link in an intervention’s chain, it makes sense to judge a charity’s cost-effectiveness on the effectiveness of the entire chain rather than the effectiveness of that particular charity on its own. After all, some small organisation performing admin for some intervention can be the most efficient in the world, but if the overall aim of the intervention is to shred money, we wouldn’t want you to give to that organisation!

What will happen if you donate $3,500 to AMF or $1.26 to SCI?

 that deworming treatments as an overall intervention (of which SCI is a part) cost $1.26 per child treated. But if you give $1.26 to SCI, that money on its own won’t treat a child: it’ll go towards the vital technical support needed to treat about 2 children. Other donors will add other necessary resources, and 

, you can expect to treat a child for $1.26.

 that the cost of averting a child’s death through bed net distribution as an overall intervention (of which AMF is a part) is $3,500. However, if you donate $3,500 to AMF, that won’t avert a death on its own. It will buy a load of bed nets. Other “non-private” donors to AMF (like Concern Universal or DFID) will then provide resources to deliver the bed nets to local partners (and provide support for the follow-up), and the local partners will do the rest. 

, you can expect to save one life for every $3,500 committed to bed net provision overall.

It would be so much easier if we could say that, by donating a certain amount of money to an effective charity, you’d be expected to avert a death! The more complicated truth is, for example, that if you give $3,500 to AMF, then you will buy 

 protecting around 2520 people and averting the deaths of 1.8 children (according to the 

Donations to our Top Charities are absolutely vital, though. Those nets need to get bought by AMF, and those governments need the support SCI provides. Without donations like yours, the necessary work of organisations like AMF and SCI cannot be done, the gaps which we know exist in the vital intervention processes which they support would not be filled, and the whole intervention wouldn’t work at all. So thanks!

Kramer Thompson

Oliver Rawle

Spreading the word this July: Engaging friends with a Charity Giving Game

Throughout the month of July, Giving What We Can is running our Tell a Friend campaign, in which we encourage our members and supporters to start a discussion with their friends about effective giving.

We’ve done some research and found that talking to a friend is the single most common way in which new members hear about Giving What We Can. By just discussing effective giving with a friend, you may be placing them on the path to becoming an effective altruist. But how can we best communicate to our friends the difference between giving and effective giving?

Those who are new to effective giving probably rely on intuitions to assess charities. They may think that the most effective charities are the most honest ones, or that they should be donating to charities which speak to them on a personal level. But these factors do not determine whether or not a charity actually makes an impact, or how cost effective a charity is. Instead, a charity’s impact and cost-effectiveness is determinable by weighing up, 

, how much it costs to run the charity, how significantly the charity helps those in need, and the severity of the problem that the charity is ameliorating.

We know that engaging a friend about effective giving may feel overwhelming, so throughout July Giving What We Can is publishing tips and information about having these conversations on our blog and 

. Our first tip is to open a conversation about effective giving by sending your friend a Giving Game.

, in which you are given information about a charity, asked whether or not you think the charity is effective, and then shown what studies have established about that charity’s effectiveness.

Also, to give an example of effective giving done right, the game also introduces two of the world’s most effective charities: Give Directly and the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF). At the end of the game, every player will choose one of these two proven effective charities to receive a $5 donation, so each player will make an impact. We will be funding up to $1000 in donations, so that’s 200 people we can reach out to!

Please share this game with your friends! By spending a few minutes working out how well they can guess charities’ effectiveness, they’ll already make sure $5 is donated to an effective charity. But even better- this could be a great way of introducing them to effective altruism; it’s sometimes surprising how seemingly similar charities can vary drastically in their effectiveness, and for many people, that’s enough of a spur to find out more about giving effectively. If you introduce a friend who ends up committing to lifelong effective giving, that’s a massive amount of good you’ve helped do, so it’s really worth giving it a go.

http://www.apaththatsclear.com/diy-charity-assessment.html

What’s so special about GiveDirectly’s basic income pilot? 

 a universal basic income intervention in Kenya: they’re planning to provide about 6,000 people with unconditional transfers for at least 10 years, transferring money to all residents of the villages which will be targeted by the intervention. This has received a lot of attention from the media, with the trial being mentioned, among others, on 

In this blog post I’ll try to give this news some context, by comparing this intervention with some alternatives. I will start by considering other types of transfers that can be made in the context of development interventions, looking at in-kind transfers and conditional cash transfer. Then I will focus on unconditional cash transfers, and specifically the ones that GiveDirectly has been delivering up until now, and explain what’s different and interesting about their new basic income pilot.

Part of international development aid is about re-distributing resources to people living in poverty. But while this seems pretty straight-forward, it is in fact not easy to work out exactly what type of resources we should move, and how they should be moved.

Traditionally, much development aid has focused on 

, that is, on the provision of specific goods and services. This might include very disparate things: from cattle, books or food, to schools and hospitals. However, some argue that 

providing cash might be better that providing in-kind aid.

 There are several arguments for this thesis, but here I’ll just mention two points. First, providing cash can be 

 This is becoming increasingly true thanks to new electronic ways of moving cash: for instance, GiveDirectly makes transfers through mobile phones, which can be cheaper than in person distributions.

 Secondly, providing cash generally leaves recipients more 

 This is good because recipients might have better information about what would be most useful for them.

However, some do not think that in-kind aid should be substituted by cash transfers. Part of the disagreement is rooted in worries about recipients 

 (what are sometimes referred as ‘temptation goods’). In fact, however, evidence suggests that this worry is 

: the evaluation of GiveDirectly’s cash transfer program shows no increase in spending on temptation goods.

Other worries seem to be more pressing: supporters of in-kind transfers argue that some essential services (such as hospital, roads and schools) 

bring benefits to people other than the recipients

 (they lead to what economists call “positive externalities”): for example, hospitals and school are likely to increase levels of health and education, and healthy and educated workers are likely to be more productive, which would in turn benefit not only them, but also the wider population. Goods which have positive externalities are likely to be 

, so might not be adequately provided through cash transfers.

Interestingly, however, cash transfers are not always offered as an alternative to public services. Sometimes, transfers are used with the specific intent of increasing the uptake of these services. This is the case of 

: transfers which are conditional on the satisfaction of certain behavioural requirements, generally concerning the health and education of children resident in the recipient household. For instance, Mexico’s “Oportunidades” conditional cash transfers programme, provides cash transfers to households conditional on their children regularly attending school and making health clinic visits.

, which means that transfers are made without any condition being set.

We have written extensively about the advantages and disadvantages of conditional and unconditional cash transfers in our new report on 

. The (really short) summary is that conditional cash transfers lead to 

 than unconditional cash transfer: more people employ education and health services, which increases workers’ skills, knowledge, and experience. However, unconditional cash transfers have the advantage of 

 households simply because they may not meet certain behavioural requirements and allow vulnerable households to identify their own needs

. They also have lower administrative costs than conditional cash transfers, since there is no need to verify that the conditions have been met.Because of this, unconditional cash transfer have received increasing attention as a tool for international development.

Blog

Welcoming over 318 new members to the Giving What We Can community

It's Good to Talk

How we talk about what donations will achieve

Spreading the word this July: Engaging friends with a Charity Giving Game

What’s so special about GiveDirectly’s basic income pilot?

Using aid to finance the refugee crisis: a worrying trend

Is Charity About Helping the Poorest?

Median GDP per capita: how much does the typical person earn in different countries? A look at Global Inequality

Everything you always wanted to know about the pledge (but were afraid to ask)

More than half a million pounds moved to top charities in Q1 2016