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Luke Freeman

Effective Giving Day 2021: Maximising your charitable impact

 around the world where a panel of effective giving experts will be available for a Q&A. This is the introduction video, links, and transcript accompanying those events.

In this post you can learn about how to do the most good with your charitable donations, and hear the latest updates from charity evaluators and expert grantmakers.

Have you ever helped someone in need? Then you know how good it can feel. But good feelings and good intentions don't always produce the desired outcomes.

Like charities. There are millions of them to choose from and the choice matters, because lives are on the line. Depending on the one you pick, you could do a little good or a lot of good -- and with some choices, you can actually cause harm.

So how can you make the best choice? How can you be sure your donation will have the impact you want, and trust that your generosity isn't wasted?

Giving What We Can is a community of thousands of like minded people who are ready to help you maximise your charitable impact. We can help you find the most pressing problems and then identify the most impactful charities working to solve them. We provide the support, community, and information you need at every stage of your giving journey, whether you're just getting started, or want to make effective giving a meaningful part of your life.

We would love you to join us. Together, we can make the world better for all its inhabitants, for generations to come.

If you want to do the most good with your resources then it can help to start by identifying what it is that you value, what resources you have, and what the world needs.

You'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't value happiness. In fact,many people within the effective altruism movement think that we should be trying to increase the amount of happy lives in the universe. This is often articulated by looking at the number, duration and quality of lives.

If you value happy lives, you also need to consider whose happiness you value, and by how much. For example:

Do you just care about people like you, or do you care about all humans alive today, wherever and whoever they may be?

Do you just care about the people living right now, or do you care about our descendants, and the kind of lives they may have?

Do you just care about humans, or do you also care about other animals: from pets to farmed or wild ones?

At Giving What We Can we recommend trying to have a wide moral circle: to value many lives without prejudice. You can often have much more impact by helping those whose needs tend to be unfairly ignored.

Another important value for you to consider is certainty: do you need to be convinced by concrete results or are you happy with 

having greater uncertainty but a chance at creating an extraordinarily big impact

How much you value certainty will significantly impact the best approach for you to maximise your charitable impact.

Different causes will benefit more or less from different resources. We have many resources that we can apply to important causes, such as our money, careers, volunteering time, and our social and political capital. Today we're looking at how to do the most good with your charitable donations.

Once we know what we value and the particular resources that we can personally apply to doing good, we need to match that up with what the world actually needs. We need to find the most pressing problems where our resources can have the greatest impact.

This is where a three-factor cause prioritisation framework that is frequently used within the effective altruism community can really help.

A problem's higher priority, the bigger, the more easily solvable and the more neglected it is.

Bigger is better, because we've got more to gain if we do solve the problem.

More easily solvable is better because it can solve the problem with less time or money.

And most subtly, more neglected is better, because of diminishing returns. The more resources that have already been invested into solving a problem, the harder it will be to make additional progress.

You can learn more about this cause selection framework and the causes that score well on it at 

After choosing a promising cause to support, we are ready to select an outstanding charity working in that area.

To ensure that every donation does as much good as possible, it's important to support charities that are cost-effective. In other words, we should try to determine which charities can accomplish the most good with the resources we give them. We want "the best bang for our charitable buck".

These charities are likely to: be supported by strong scientific or theoretical evidence, be cost-effective, and have room for more funding.

We go through charity selection criteria in great detail at 

, but fortunately there are two promising ways to rely on experts who have done the work for you. We recommend you use charity evaluators and expert grantmakers.

Choose individual charities: using charity evaluators

Charity evaluators assess charities based on how effectively they use donations. We particularly recommend following the advice of 

, which evaluates charities working on global health and development, and 

, which evaluates charities working on animal advocacy.

 was founded to help donors find and support the nonprofits where donations will save or improve lives most per dollar.

"This is the exact position I was in back in 2006. I was a young person, was very fortunate to have money to give away and felt like it was impossible to figure out where to give and be confident that I was having a big impact on the world. And so GiveWell now gives donors the ability to put those good intentions to work and use that money to have a big impact on people's lives."
Elie Hassenfeld -- Co-founder & CEO, Givewell

Research is the core product at GiveWell. It's what we put out in the world to share with donors to help guide their giving,

GiveWell spends over 20,000 hours each year looking at academic studies to figure out which programs are the most promising, connecting with organizations that implement those programs to figure out which are the most effective at doing so and ultimately bringing all of that together to come up with a short list of recommendations that we think can help people the most per dollar donated.

They try as much as possible to put numbers to the effectiveness of their giving efforts.

Since 2007, GiveWell has directed more than $700 million dollars to its recommended charities --- taking zero fees for themselves along the way. And because these donations reach effective organizations, more lives are saved from malaria, more kids are treated for parasitic worms, and more children receive vital nutritional supplements.

Like many people, you love animals. When they're suffering you want to help them. Unfortunately, many different kinds of animals need help: from abandoned pets to endangered elephants.

Most of us have limited time and money and it's hard to know where to start in order to make the biggest difference for the most animals. It's important to think strategically.

Say you have $100 to donate or five hours of your time to volunteer. What if spending time and money on Project A helps five animals but spending the same time and money on Project B helps 100 animals? The more impactful choice is pretty clear but how do you know which projects will help the most animals?

 come in: they do the research for you. Using their free resources you can discover the best ways for you to help as many animals as possible. Whether you're a volunteer or a donor, visit 

 and they'll help you be the best advocate you can.

Funds are easy for donors and highly effective. They help donors pool their money together to find outstanding giving opportunities that are evaluated by expert grantmakers and trusted charity evaluators.

Using a grantmaking fund is similar to using an investment fund instead of trying to pick which individual stocks will be the best investments. The fund distributes your donation among multiple grantees on the basis of expected impact.

GiveWell and Animal Charity Evaluators both have funds that regrant to their top charities -- this is a great option for donors who value more certainty alongside expert advice. We also recommend other funds that make more bespoke grants, such as 

 -- these are great options for donors who take a '

' to giving so that they can have higher expected-value.

 helps donors to maximise impact across the four key cause areas:

You choose your allocation across the funds, donate with cash, crypto, or stocks and then these expert-led funds regrant your donations to where they'll have the biggest impact.

EA Funds is trusted by thoughtful donors around the world, and tax-deductible in the UK, USA and Netherlands.

 gives you as an individual the opportunity to maximise your positive climate impact. This year they've spent over 1,000 hours finding the best opportunities for climate philanthropy and navigating a quickly changing landscape.

As a fund, they're able to act quickly: when Biden won 

they directly deployed over $1m to our top charities

, enabling the top charities to engage with the incoming administration; and just last month they greenlighted a PR grant within hours, 

allowing a major report launched at COP26

They're able to incubate new organisations too: last year they did this with 

, an innovation think tank which we think has the potential to largely increase Europe's contribution to global decarbonisation.

They're also able to act boldly and adapt to this changing landscape: this year they're making a multiple year globalisation grant for the 

, enabling new programs in China, India, Africa and Asia-Pacific where emissions are rising and a large part of our climate future will be shaped.

Individually evaluated charities and grantmaking funds are a great way for most donors to give effectively. However, it doesn't end there. Next we're going to highlight two other innovative approaches to maximising your charitable impact.

Every great charity had to start with a small donation. One of the ways to have a huge impact is by leveraging your donation and supporting organisations that are small and underfunded and might be potentially the next most-impactful thing.

, or these massive organisations that are having a huge impact; at the beginning, funding them would have been extremely high leverage (giving them the ability to expand and grow and eventually have the massive impact they have today).

 is an organisation that focuses on creating organisations with this sort of potential. They do substantial research to brainstorm top ideas and then dig deeper into them to see whether they're implementable and tractable.

They scour the globe for talented individuals who can come together and in a 2 month program match up with each other, balance each other's skill sets, and eventually found a fantastic charity. Then they give them a bunch of support, whether that's logistical support, mentorship, or a seed grant.

They've founded 18 charitable organisations that have received over $1 million funding from Charity Entrepreneurship and several million dollars more from other charitable organisations.

They think that supporting early-stage organisations as a whole has a unique potential to leverage donations in a way that is hard to get anywhere else. This sort of innovative approach, a 

 approach will result in some misses, some charities that don't turn out to have 'the most impact'. But for the occasional charity that does have this massive impact the benefits to donating them and supporting them early is massive.

 to support these kinds of organisations and they constantly receive donations and constantly keep an eye out for new opportunities that might be the field leaders of tomorrow.

Humanity is impatient. Collectively, we spend more on ice cream each year than on preventing our own extinction and we neglect our own interests (and those of future generations) in doing so.

 is a first-of-its-kind vehicle, designed to compensate for our collective impatience. The fund aims to identify not only what to fund to safeguard and benefit the future, but also when is the best time to deploy funding.

Rather than giving everything away now, the Fund pools contributions and invests them to grow and to ensure capital is at the ready when we need it most.

As such, the Patient Philanthropy Fund functions as an ultimate rainy day fund for humanity and as an insurance policy for our common future.

Effective giving news & updates from 2021

their progress in identifying room for more funding

 have shown promise and they expect their funding to this cause to grow significantly in future years. They have also 

changed how they produce their impact estimates

. More details can be found on their website.

 comparing the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers and psychotherapy in terms of improving subjective well-being. They found that 

 (a non-profit that provides psychotherapy to African women with depression) is 

12 times more cost-effective than providing cash transfers

. This result means that StrongMinds may be on a par with the top deworming charities recommended by GiveWell.

 they're turning their criminal justice reform program into an independent organisation called "

 on the changing landscape of high-impact climate philanthropy.

Charity Entrepreneurship have announced the launch of five new charities

 as well as many research summaries across the cause areas of 

For donors in the US, UK, and The Netherlands it is easy to donate to most of the high impact charities evaluated by organisations mentioned today using Effective Altruism Funds.

There are also many country-specific regranting organisations that have been set up to help donors around the world donate to highly impactful charities while receiving a local tax-deduction or other government benefit. We have an exhaustive list of these regranting organisations available at 

Join us for Effective Giving Day 2021

In these events you will learn how to do the most good with your charitable donations, hear the latest updates from charity evaluators and expert grantmakers, and participate in a Q&A with experts in effective giving.

How you can choose high impact causes and charities to support

Updates from charity evaluators and grantmaking organisations

Innovations in effective charitable giving

Practical giving advice including tax deductibility for different countries and causes

You will have the opportunity to ask questions in a Q&A with a panel of experts in the field of effective giving, including:

These event will be great for both newcomers to effective giving and those who’ve already made effective giving a meaningful part of their lives.

Julian Hazell

The best charities in the world are significantly more effective than average ones, yet few people seem to prioritise effectiveness when deciding where to donate. This article explores a new research paper that discusses the psychology behind ineffective altruism and what might be done to encourage people to give more effectively.

Giving to Ineffective Charities is Psychologically Tempting. Here's Why We Should Resist.

 in the world are significantly more effective than average ones, 

 to prioritise effectiveness when deciding where to donate.

‘The Psychology of (In)effective Altruism’

 which explores the psychology behind this puzzling phenomenon. This article summarises some of the most important ideas from this paper.

Understanding charity effectiveness is crucial

Imagine you win a $100,000 lottery ticket, half of which you intend to donate to a deserving cause. Since your grandfather recently lost his eyesight, you feel especially motivated to donate to a charity that can prevent others from suffering the same fate.

You have now picked the cause you’d like to donate to and the amount you’d like to give. The only question that remains is which charity should you pick.

Let’s say that you have two options: a charity that offers preventative surgery for chronic eye conditions in a low-income country, and one that trains guide dogs for people who are blind that live in a high-income country. After searching on Google, you find that it only costs $100 to save a person in a low-income country from going blind from trachoma, an infectious eye disease that 

 actively suffer from. By contrast, it costs nearly $50,000 to train a guide dog to assist a person who is blind in a high-income country.

Looking at the numbers should make the choice clear: for the entire $50,000 you’d like to donate, you can either improve the life of one person who is blind in a high-income country by providing them with a sightseeing dog (but not actually cure them of blindness), or prevent 500 people in low-income countries from going blind in the first place.

It is likely that you (and many others) do not value the welfare of a single person in a high-income country as much as you value the welfare of 500 others in a low-income country. But looking at which charities people in rich countries such as the US donate to paints a very different picture: a relatively small portion of all US charitable giving goes to highly effective charities — ones that typically operate in low-income countries. So beyond the amount that you donate, it is perhaps more important to consider the effectiveness of the charity you’re donating to, rather than simply thinking about the amount you give.

“The variation in charity effectiveness is much larger than the variation in donation amounts that a donor is likely to consider: you can double your impact by doubling the amount that you give to typical charities, but you can multiply your impact by a factor of ten, 100, or even 1000 by choosing to support more effective charities”

It is clear that cost-effectiveness is crucial when we intend to use our limited resources to help others. Knowing how to avoid the things that stop us from being cost-effective is important so we can do as much good as possible with our time, energy, and money.

In this section, the authors explore two main obstacles to effective altruism: motivational obstacles, and epistemic obstacles.

Motivational obstacles are what stop us from achieving the things we would like to achieve. Epistemic obstacles arise from gaps in our knowledge and reasoning. The most important ideas from each category are summarised below.

Donors tend to view charitable giving as different from, say, buying a car. Whereas customers explicitly care about cost-effectiveness (e.g., researching the most reliable car for a given budget), donors seem to care less. Why? Possible explanations include the fact that many people view charity as inherently subjective and non-obligatory. If charity is subjective, — such that there is no right or wrong choice — cost-effectiveness becomes less important as donors can simply choose whatever they feel is best.

“The perceived subjectivity of giving may be the most fundamental obstacle to effective giving.”

What encourages the preferences we have for where to donate? Research indicates that charitable giving is commonly influenced by emotions, including empathy for the victim and the positive feelings one gets from helping others. Crucially, these emotions are not always triggered by effectiveness: one might feel equally good about themselves after donating $50 to a blind dog charity versus one that prevents trachoma, despite the fact that the latter is vastly more effective.

“Charitable giving, and helping behavior more generally, is typically driven by emotional motivators such as empathy (or sympathy) for victims or the positive satisfaction of personally provisioning a good (i.e., ‘warm glow’).”

We are more likely to donate to causes we find personally meaningful, even if they aren’t effective. Many of us in high-income countries probably know someone who has battled cancer, whereas few can say the same for malaria. And if we donate solely based on what we are personally connected to, we might be more inclined to donate to cancer research instead of malaria prevention, despite the fact that additional money towards cancer research is unlikely to save as many lives as funding anti-malarial interventions.

Blog

Effective Giving Day 2021: Maximising your charitable impact

Join us for Effective Giving Day 2021

Giving to Ineffective Charities is Psychologically Tempting. Here's Why We Should Resist.

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