Giving Better: How to Open Your Eyes when you Donate to Charity
Chris Cloud
Philanthropic Counsel, Non-profit Fundraising Expert, Jewelry E-Commerce Operations
What are the goals of charitable giving? Overwhelmingly, people say they give to charity because of a sense of duty to give back: A positive use of the resources that flowed to them to help others. A lot of people encounter a cause and become compelled to support it. An illness or a need ties into the arc of their life story. Many others are guided to give through faith and religion. I spent a career working to help nonprofits raise money and find it surprising how few useful tools there are to guide people who want their charitable dollars. This article combines DIY approaches I've learned with concepts of effective altruism that are becoming increasingly important as we face pressing dilemmas like climate change. Effective altruism is a social movement that looks to evidence and analysis to guide donations to where they do the most.
The positive effect of your giving is magnified and multiplied with better knowledge about ways to give. That’s the point of this article. We live in a world where we can track down answers online. This is also a time of collapsed trust that can inspire people to do their homework rather than take somebody's word for it. Take a sobering glance at the Edelman Trust Barometer study for this year that outlines an international "trust bankruptcy". Only corporations retain a shred of credibility. Is that the best we can do?
Each of us has the power to guide the trajectory of good intentions. This article is devoted to mapping out the ways ordinary people can find causes to back for the greater good and maximize the impact of dollars that they choose to give to charity.
I. Thought Experiment: What is the Range of My Choices?
Let's say that you have money to give to charity. What cause does the most good? What means the most to you? You can search online for guidance, but you won’t find a lot. For example, here is the advice of Charity Navigator, a website that offers efficiency ratios based on the numbers pulled from charity tax filings. Here is a giving idea punch list from Fidelity Charitable, an advisor that sets up donor advised funds. And here is practical consumer information from the Federal Trade Commission to help avoid screwing it up when you give to charity.
Regardless of this grossly generalized advice or any precautions you take, the choice depends on your personal preference. But your preference has limited the scope of your knowledge. If you knew more options you could do more.
Let's say the local church has a leak in the roof that could be fixed with $4,000. You'd like to donate to fix the roof. You know the church, you believe in the good work that they do, and you know that the leak in the roof is causing havoc. This is easy and it’s close to home. If fixing the roof of the church with your $4,000 is the option that means the most to you then that's all that matters. It's your money.
However, let's imagine that if you knew more you might make a better gift or a different choice. For instance, you might take time to join the church finance committee so you could learn how charitable gifts are deployed. You could make sure the $4,000 is efficiently utilized for the purpose intended. Or you might network with different construction companies around town to get a better understanding of the repair options. This could improve the outcome and contain expense. It magnifies your gift. You might get better satisfaction and validation.
Let's expand the experiment. What if you knew about a wider range of choices? What if you learned that a charity with your local hospital could pay for an operation to save someone’s eyesight? That would be a big deal to most people. Maybe that would mean more to you than the leaky church roof.
What if you learned that $4,000 could save the life of someone in sub-Saharan Africa? (I'm not kidding here; take a look at GiveWell's charity cost-effectiveness analysis spreadsheet that prices out saving a life with charity.) To some helping strangers far away wouldn't have meaning. For others, the profound nature of saving a human life might steal the show.
What if you could spend your $4,000 on a medical cure for an indigenous tribe in South America so they no longer pass a lethal inherited illness to their children? (Consider these birth defects and genetic disease charities.) In the South America scenario, your gift today would have no immediate effect, however, years from now dozens of people would be spared premature death. Those people are far away, and you don't know them, and the benefit is deferred. On the other hand, the scope of the benefit is magnified to dozens of lives spared.
II. Practical Tools to Give Better
We owe it to ourselves and the charities we support to go in with our eyes open. What is a wide menu of choices near and far? Once we know a topic we like, how do we become educated about sound, effective nonprofits to support? Which ones are upstanding, reliable, effective, efficient? Let’s start with sleuthing for solid charities. Here are some suggestions:
Let's start easy: websites will do some work for you. Watchdog websites look through charitys’ tax filings, practices, and governance documents and seek to offer apples-to-apples comparisons about who is good and who is bad (here's a list of 20 bad charities). A great one-stop-shop for this is Charity Navigator which offers a dashboard showing revenue vs. expense and ratio analysis of expenditures devoted to fundraising vs. administration vs. serving the non-profit mission. Here is Charity Navigator's method. And here is the hall of fame list of charities with the Charity Navigator perfect score. Unfortunately, Charity Navigator picks and chooses which non-profits it evaluates so many are left without a report - you could search for them and come up empty. A similar site is Charity Watch which rates 670 charities. Here is the page from Charity Watch describing their method.
These websites rely largely on the federal tax forms filed by nonprofits each year known as Form 990. You can go right to the source and look at these tax forms and draw your conclusions. Just visit Guidestar (now re-branding as "Candid"), sign up for a free account, and pull publicly available charity tax filings yourself. It takes ten minutes.
At first, it looks dense. But (surprisingly) the government has imposed this format to help find stuff. On the cover page, you see the total number of employees, number of volunteers, total revenue, revenue minus expenses, and total assets. There is a special line for fundraising expenses (this is line 16b). With simple division, these numbers show you how much it costs the non-profit to raise a dollar (here is the math: Fundraising Expense on Line 16b divided by Total Revenue on Line 12). I would argue that it should never cost a non-profit more than $0.30 to raise a dollar. Many would suggest a lower benchmark, $0.25 or $0.20. Some nonprofits operate leaner than that, but if they are fatter then something seems wrong. A nonprofit with a big cost to raise a dollar may be paying direct mail and telephone outreach consultants to hawk for donations. These vendors can be aggressive, expensive, beyond regulation, and there is something generally unappetizing about expensive gun-for-hire fundraising.
Inside the guts of a 990, you can find detailed breakdowns of expenses (Part IX) and you can see what expenses are attributable to fundraising as opposed to administration and delivering on the mission. These figures are subject to the vagaries of accounting. An accountant can opt to park expenses to the left or the right so these figures are not consistent from nonprofit to nonprofit. But they do provide a snapshot. A quick and handy metric is the salaries of the top executives at a nonprofit. These numbers are included in the 990 filings (look for Part VII Section A). The salary of the top employee should be on the order of 10% of total expenses. With a super big, complex nonprofit, this might scale to 2.5%. If you see a top salary bigger than 10% then something is wrong. Non-profit workers deserve a fair salary but they are also drawn to nonprofit work in part because they're inspired by the mission. Big salaries say something is out of whack.
Another good barometer is the transparency with which non-profits provide information. I find that the nonprofit by-laws furnish a good test. The by-laws are the internal operational rules. Where I work there's no legal requirement to file your bylaws with the state or to publish them for your donors. These by-laws reveal how a nonprofit is run. I have seen curious things. Bylaws can be wildly out of date (typed on onion skin typewriter paper), or they can confer lifetime appointments for trustees. This is not good governance and engenders founder's syndrome. You don't want some non-profit leaders to have more influence than others creating a kind of fiefdom inappropriate for nonprofits created in the public trust.
You don't need to do a heavy forensic evaluation of by-laws. I find that just asking for them tells you a lot. If the non-profit affirmatively posts them on the website or gives them up freely on request, then that's a good sign. If they become defensive and won't give up their bylaws that's a different indication.
The last quick check is a simple Google News search with the name of the organization in quotes, possibly repeated with the name of the executive director and board chair. If anything detrimental bubbles up in the news that is worth knowing before you commit your donation.
You also have the option to turn to sites like GiveWell and Giving Green that evaluate data, read the reports, weigh the questions, ask the experts, and then point you to the most actionable, evidence-based, and effective options known to them. More about both of them later in the article.
III. What Does Professional Charity Research Look Like?
The value of research tools like Charity Navigator is they inform your choices but do not second guess you. Charity Navigator's system traditionally has limits (take a look at "Unpacking Charity Navigator's Rating System"). Charity watchdog sites are one-size-fits-all. You can find eye-opening examples of professional-grade research.
Take for instance the story of GiveWell. GiveWell was started in 2006 by a team of former hedge fund people. They had been giving to charity and trading ideas about the best charities based on the information they could find, including the research tools I've described in Part II. Meeting every few weeks and working to dig deeper, they began to reach out directly to individual charities asking them to validate claims about effectiveness. Reportedly, they encountered resistance. So they started GiveWell. (GiveWell FAQs.)
GiveWell researches charities down to the deck plates. They recommend a clutch of top-performing charities, currently nine. If these top performers flag, then they remove them from the list. They also recommend ancillary charities that support their top-rated causes. Givewell also accepts donations through its Maximum Impact Fund and then disburses the money based on their research. According to the grant chart, the Maximum Impact Fund gave about $40M in 2020. To put this in context, $40M is about 10% of what the Walton Family Foundation gives away annually.
The research process at GiveWell is more sophisticated than most casual philanthropists could match. It involves deep investigation within certain pre-determined areas of philanthropy deemed to have the most promise for effectiveness. Most of these causes are in developing countries simply because a dollar means more. At one point they explored US education but are now devoted to global health and development.
GiveWell's deep dive research requires 15 to 40 hours per potential grantee. They are looking for (1) evidence of effectiveness, (2) cost-effectiveness, (3) transparency, and (4) room for more funding. Come crunch time, which is November each year, members of the GiveWell team come together to discuss their findings and get critical inquiry from their colleagues as they discuss pros and cons. About 2% of those potential grantees make the grade. Yes, they wash out 98%.
What's a GiveWell example? Early on GiveWell liked VillageReach, a health system logistics charity. Working in Mozambique, VillageReach debugged a healthcare supply crisis that was causing vaccine "stock outs". They changed out the local wood fire systems for refrigeration and brought in more reliable propane. They introduced an information management system that also conveniently serves as proof of effectiveness. GiveWell once calculated that VillageReach was saving lives for under $1,000 each. But GiveWell is restless. They constantly interrogate data and they pay attention. Just two years after VillageReach was listed as a top charity GiveWell demoted it because it didn't believe there was sufficient additional room for effective funding.
GiveWell argues that there is a difference between effectiveness and efficiency. If you pare down your nonprofit expenses to maximize efficiency then you are paying people less money, you're losing the best people, you're skimping on consultants who might give you insight about how to improve your effectiveness, and so on. If your nonprofit is a simple soup kitchen in your hometown then there could be a case for maximum efficiency. But if you are distributing vaccines in a foreign country then you need professional guidance about logistics, language, culture, and how to get the thing done. GiveWell argues that the race to maximum efficiency can sacrifice effectiveness. They take the time to discover what works, not like Charity Navigator that discovers what is operationally lean.
GiveWell takes a skeptics approach. They presume that most non-profits are ineffective and look for affirmative proof that they work. GiveWell believes effectiveness and revenue are disconnected. A nonprofit with great contacts and a compelling marketing story may raise tons of money yet prove ultimately ineffective. Nonprofits that are well funded are unlikely to increase their efficiency if they are given more money. So the big, well-known charities vacuum up donations but often fail to deliver substantially increased outcomes related to the extra dollars flowing in.
GiveWell underscores the shortcomings of researching through something like Charity Navigator. Charity Navigator is looking to apply apple-to-apples standards across different charities that do different things. They're relying on numeric formulas sucked blindly from lines in the tax filings. GiveWell is in another league.
But GiveWell has limits. They ignore animal issues (for animal welfare organizations please consider The Good Food Institute, The Albert Schweitzer Foundation, and many of the top-rated organizations identified by Charity Navigator.) GiveWell is also opinionated. They feel strongly about a small number of organizations.
There are other sophisticated research options on the horizon. In the last half dozen years, Impact Matters was established that uses a broader cost-effectiveness analysis. Perhaps admitting the limitations of its quantitative-based approach, Charity Navigator acquired Impact Matters last year. By improving the standard Impact Matters revealed Charity Navigator’s deficiencies and now the two are combined with a net improvement.
GiveWell is trying to find great donation opportunities, rather than rate all non-profits against each other. It is an investment mindset that comes from former investors. If you visit the GiveWell site expecting to see a rating of your favorite charity you will be disappointed. However, if you go to the site inspired to find an opportunity that will maximize the effectiveness of your donation, then this is where you should look. The research is scrupulous and the recommendation process is transparent. GiveWell provides an opportunity to take more responsibility for charitable giving through sophisticated and devoted research that donors can tap.
IV. No Middleman: What About Direct, Cash Donations to Those in Need?
GiveDirectly is an organization that champions unconditional cash transfers, the purest way to help those in need. They impose no obligation to repay or preconditions for eligibility. GiveDirectly works to refute the idea "you can't just give money to poor people." It is a noble experiment worth considering.
GiveDirectly increased granting dramatically since COVID, up to $200M last year compared with about $50M a few years ago. To put that in context, $200M/year puts GiveDirectly close to the grant volume of the MacArthur Foundation. GiveDirectly granted more in cash transfers last year than the giving of Bloomberg or the Rockefeller Foundation. GiveDirectly is a big deal that is making a name for itself as the gold standard for effective philanthropy in the eyes of sophisticated organizations like GiveWell that have done their homework: Read GiveWell's endorsement of GiveDirectly.
The idea of handing out unconditional grants is hard to accept. The GiveDirectly philosophy stems from developmental economics. They validate their approach with an elaborate page with supporting research. This page highlights 300 studies formatted in GiveDirectly's cash research explorer.
GiveDirectly points to randomized experiments concluding that cash gifts rarely result in the diversion of funds to tobacco or alcohol. At least in the developing world, these direct grants don't result in a reduction of work output. Anyone who's ever struggled to find the perfect birthday gift can appreciate the challenge: How do you understand the circumstances in, say, rural Kenya enough to truly help a person struggling there? GiveDirectly skewers the conceit that the donor knows best.
GiveDirectly focuses on community-wide structures in faraway places. By focussing on remote, third-world locations to make their grants, GiveDirectly simplifies the giving equation and avoids adverse selection. An example of adverse selection is handing someone money on the street. If you hand a homeless person money in front of your home you don't know the whole story. The homelessness problem here is not as simple as a person without a residence. The problem has layers of contributing issues like race, drug abuse, alcoholism, economy, employment, etc.
GiveDirectly works with implementation partners to fund entire communities in six countries in rural parts of Africa. Each person in the community gets aid, on average about $288. This simple model is made possible by the technology of mobile phone-linked payment services. The idea is to give to pockets of society where the challenges are evenly shared in the community. The concept is like a universal basic income experiment. Much of these gifts remain within the circle of the community. The money bounces around the local economy, magnifying the effect. This grows the microeconomics of a village and produces a total effect bigger than the cash value of the gifts.
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GiveDirectly looks to refute critics with radical transparency. Check out this live feed depicting grant recipients. Here is a snippet of one exchange.
Q. Describe the moment when you first received your money:
A. "It was around 8.30 am when I was doing some mulching for my coconut palm seedlings when I received a message on my phone. Upon confirming, I didn’t believe my eyes seeing the amount of money that GiveDirectly had sent me. I was overwhelmed since I hadn’t imagined that I can receive such an amount of money at my tender age of 31 years, something that kept me wondering."
Q. What did you spend your transfer on?
A. "Since I owned a very small house which I was not happy about due to the hard financial status I was passing through, I opted to construct a nice looking house that a young man like me desires to have. I bought 20 pieces of gal sheets for KES 30000.00, 15 bags of cement for KES 9300.00, and metal rods."
Q. What is the happiest part of your day?
A. "Evening is the happiest part of my day. It is usually at this time that I come home from the hustles of the day. At this time, I get to see my family and we cook and eat together from the little money I would have earned that day. Seeing my family happy and especially my children around me gives me more joy and happiness. This gives more energy to work hard to meet their basic needs."
GiveDirectly draws a straight line from the donor to the recipient. GiveDirectly audits everything using Google management technology in the field. This includes timestamp data, geo stamp data, satellite imagery, photographs of the recipients, and telephonic reports about the cash receipt experience including whether a bribe had to be paid for the transfer, the distance traveled to get the money, etc.
GiveDirectly has gaps. It doesn't address a shortage of roads or vaccines. However, it offers a compelling simplicity and transparency. GiveDirectly exemplifies a platform from which we can consider new possibilities for non-profit organizations that deliver results, offer transparency, and refute traditional thinking.
V. The Sky’s the Limit: How Do Billionaires Choose Their Charities?
Dustin Moskowitz (dob 5/22/84) is the youngest self-made billionaire in history, a co-founder of Facebook with a 2.34% interest in the company and an estimated wealth of $24.4BN. With his wife, Cari, the couple searched for a research-informed way to maximize their philanthropy. After looking around (a search fortified by unlimited personal wealth), they knocked on the door at GiveWell and asked those guys if they could help.
GiveWell blazed a new path with rigorous, professional-quality research about charities. So it is not surprising that Dustin and Cari Moskowitz approached them. They asked GiveWell how their formula could be refined to channel hundreds of millions of dollars of Moskowitz wealth into research-informed projects with high impact. The result was to spin off a separate organization born of GiveWell called Open Philanthropy which describes itself in this way:
"Open Philanthropy’s mission is to give as effectively as we can and share our findings openly so that anyone can build on our work. Through research and grantmaking, we hope to learn how to make philanthropy go especially far in terms of improving lives. We’re passionate about maximizing the impact of our giving, and we’re excited to connect with other donors who share our passion.
How do hundreds of millions of dollars from a Facebook founder influence the GiveWell formula? This turns out to be broadening the giving targets with those Dustin and Cari like plus adopting a riskier philosophy like an entrepreneurial moonshot approach. Open Philanthropy believes in high risk/high consequence philanthropy different from a traditional foundation like Ford, or Bloomberg, or MacArthur.
The influence of the Moscowitz family brought animal causes front and center. GiveWell values people while Open Philanthropy supports animal causes, notably addressing the horrific and largely ignored scourge of intensive animal farming. (You can research this topic with eye-popping results: imagine industrially farmed roaster chickens genetically engineered so they are too fat to stand and pack 12 birds to the square meter so they can't move until time for slaughter.) GiveWell pretty much takes a pass on animal welfare issues, defending its position in the FAQs by pointing to others, including Open Philanthropy, that have taken up the cause for animals (GiveWell does recommend animal welfare organizations in its blog).
Open Philanthropy's attention to animal welfare follows their philosophy of pursuing neglected areas that have an outsized impact. Hence, because intensive animal farming conditions are so dire, small changes can improve treatment for literally millions of animals. Open Philanthropy looks at three factors: (1) the importance of something (how many individuals are affected and how deeply), (2) The neglectedness of an area (those that fail to receive sufficient attention from other actors), and (3) the tractability (meaning the practical ways by which funders can contribute to a solution).
Beyond attention to animal welfare, Open Philanthropy supports criminal justice reform, macroeconomic stabilization policy, immigration policy, and land-use reform. These are heady categories that most casual donors would not recognize. The underlying distinction between the GiveWell and Open Philanthropy is the moonshot approach. Open Philanthropy embraces a high-risk approach that could produce profound downstream benefits to society. This approach is more speculative. It has a higher risk of failure than most charitable givers want to accept.
Open Philanthropy's moonshot idea is that there are certain inflection points in the development of human society, like the industrial revolution for instance. If we can see these coming then we might manage against the worst possible outcomes. Consider two inflection points: synthetic biology and artificial intelligence. Scientific work on viruses is booming ahead, for good or for ill. It could result in exposure and a pandemic catastrophic for humankind. That's worth heading off at the pass if we can.
Now consider the Terminator AI scenario where artificial intelligence progresses to the point that computers can run the operations of human life. Once we hand over control, what if this runs amok? The constructive potential for artificial intelligence is fantastic. Imagine taking a problem like a covid vaccine or global warming and handing it over to a bank of computers that spit out a solution in a few minutes. But conversely, imagine asking the same super brain-computer how to infiltrate the United States power grid and shut it down. Things can turn sour depending on who's asking the question and their motives (or the ethical constructs baked in to - or washed out of - the computer algorithm).
Philanthropic investment in these moonshot scenarios doesn't save a single life right now but could save millions in years to come and could change the course of history for the better. With this thinking, Open Philanthropy conducts research and grantmaking and they share their findings so others can echo their approach. They are massively self-funded so they don't need to apologize or rationalize to donors. At the end of the year, they recommend nonprofits you can support based on their thorough research. Here are the 2020 recommendations.
Open Philanthropy has an enlightened perspective about research that informs their philanthropic approach (take a look at their page on cause selection). They are sensitive to the flaws in research, including motivations and methodology. They point out that researchers are often motivated to produce visible results that distinguish them individually and advance their careers, sometimes at the expense of method integrity. Rarely are there self-policing studies that interrogate the quality and integrity of other studies, or conduct sweeping reviews of a body of research. Often studies bend in the same direction. Open Philanthropy is devoted to reasoning transparency. They follow GiveWell's preference for larger gold standard studies, the "very best, most expensive, most 'perfectionist' studies" that are more heavily scrutinized and more immunized from bias.
In addition to a skeptical, scrupulous approach to research, Open Philanthropy is devoted to cultivating informed human capital. There are precious few people who understand the sweep and implication of broad, esoteric areas of study, like artificial intelligence or synthetic biology. The people who have this knowledge are usually employed by an organization with organizational interests, not necessarily humanistic interests. Open Philanthropy develops research talent with a deep and professionally informed understanding of the subject matter, the root and branch concepts, the key players, and the body of research. In this way, they invest in knowledgeable, independent guides to lead them in pursuit of complex, deeply consequential areas.
VI. Are we in a New Era of Informed Giving?
A few organizations are expanding the possibilities for charitable giving, but disappointingly much about charity is the same as it was 20 or 40 years ago. There is reason to believe in change. Consider that during Covid the number of billionaires increased by 30% while existing billionaires are worth $1TN more than they were before the pandemic. Consider MacKenzie Scott who gave away $8.5BN last year, the largest amount ever given by a living philanthropist. Yet even accounting for the $8.5BN she gifted, her wealth grew because of the magic of securities valuation and the compounding factors in large personal fortunes. With more billionaires, the traditional foundations will take a back seat to new philanthropists ready to re-write the rules.
What about the rest of us who are not billionaires and who want to do our part? Charity is said to be a natural impulse to help with an immediate situation; philanthropy is a strategic, long-term approach to address the root causes of social issues. Charity is tsunami relief. Philanthropy is ending malaria. Our personal choice can be charity or it can be philanthropy.
A formula to donate wisely starts with your preference. I suggest starting with questions about your sense of proximity and then empathy. Concerning proximity: do you want to help with things close to you and with problems happening right now, or are you OK helping with stuff far away, and/or that impacts the future rather than the present? Concerning empathy: do people matter the most to you and if so what people?
Next, I suggest you consider how you feel about results. Do you need to see a positive benefit yourself or are you satisfied trusting reports provided by others? Can you support something entrepreneurial and risky that might multiply into bigger, more profound outcomes, or do you need a sure thing? Do you want straightforward results or do you have a speculator's appetite for moonshot approaches? And then is the question of concentration: Do you want to give to a lot of charities broadly and cover a lot of different issues, or if you want to concentrate on a single or small handful of issues?
Identifying your comfort and preference produces a choice profile. Here is a taxonomy of different areas of giving and their subsets produced by Charity Navigator. Comparing these with other sources I believe the root topics for charitable giving can be summarized as:
Once you have an area of focus you can use search engines, Charity Navigator, review news articles, and size up the players in that space. How do you pinpoint the charity that's right for you? Let's start with avoiding scams. You should confirm that your target charity is bona fide on the IRS look-up site. Even if the IRS lists your charity you want to be sure it isn't a scam charity like bogus veterans organizations or "Red Cross of Americas" that looks like The American Red Cross to it can siphon off donations under pretenses. Protect your financial transactions by using a credit card, not giving with gift cards or cash.
If the charity you target is legit, then see if they meet your reporting/feedback needs. Check to make sure they report results. Most charities are pretty bad at this so you owe it to yourself to investigate. I would reach out directly. There's going to be an all-purpose email address on the donation webpage or a telephone number devoted to fielding donation questions. Ask them plainly what gets reported back to you if you donate. Most will send you mindlessly to their website, or maybe their tax filings. Perhaps you want more. Say so. How do they verify they are doing constructive and additive things with your donation? How do you know your dollars don't vanish in a black hole of their budget?
If you are satisfied with the answers you get about reporting then take it to the next step and get a name and a phone number or email address so you can follow up later. Come back to this contact if the results aren't as promised. Most states, including New York, have the means to complain if you think a charity isn't on the up and up. And you can take your complaint to the Feds.
You can also infiltrate by seeking a volunteer opportunity with the charity and check it out from the inside. Are they respectful and inclusive with their volunteers? Do they give you real stuff to work on that has meaning? Does the experience lead you to admire and trust how they operate?
If you're willing to take a recommendation from a news article or GiveWell, you should still conduct due diligence. You can up your research game using Google Scholar to pull academic articles and become knowledgeable about the problems, the proposed solutions, the results, and the players in that field. Look for gold-standard studies that are big and take a long time and use randomized control studies as part of their methodology. If a study is more expensive and time-consuming it is at less risk for publication bias, it will get more scrutiny, and it is less likely to be left unpublished if it contains unwanted results.
Be careful about larger charities. It does feel good to put your money in the hands of a name brand. However, once a charity gets to a certain size you have to question what real, incremental results come with additional modest donations. Usually, the little guys tend to be able to do more with your money and they are more willing to show appreciation and results.
When it comes to climate change there are special considerations. The crisis is alarming with a scope big enough to eat all other philanthropic problems. It serves as a good closing note for this article. Now four years old, John Halstead's 174-page Founders Pledge document remains a go-to source for how climate change intersects with philanthropy. At that time Halstead recommended the Coalition for Rainforest Nations and the Clean Air Task Force as nonprofits meeting the effective altruism challenge for addressing climate change.
A number of fascinating non-profits have sprung up in recent years to meet the problem. Consider for example Homegrown National Park, a grassroots advocacy group devoted to regenerating biodiversity in suburban backyards. They encourage homeowners to swap their carpets of lush, green, traditional lawn for a backyard setting of indigenous plants that sequester more carbon, contribute to natural ecosystems, and support pollinators.
How do you know the best climate change causes for your money and volunteer time? One approach is Giving Green which was directly inspired by the Givewell model. Giving Green has public policy researchers, climate change specialists, and data scientists searching for the most actionable, evidence-based, and cost-effective climate change solutions, both short-term and for long-term systemic change. Here is a white paper that describes Giving Green's approach. They have three workstreams: 1) finding and promoting high quality, evidence-backed offsets, 2) identifying evidence-backed policy change initiatives to support, and 3) finding the best investment opportunities to help the private sector drive change.
Carbon offsets furnish an excellent example of the mismatch of best intentions and productive outcomes that is the theme of this article. Carbon offsets are a commercial way for individuals and businesses to trade out their own carbon emissions with purchased projects that produce greenhouse gas reductions. Of course, there are flaws. The United Nations Clean Development Mechanism certifies offsets under the Kyoto protocol. Sadly, it concluded that 85% of the projects analyzed have a “low likelihood that emission reductions are additional and are not over-estimated.”
Even with the best intentions, each of us needs to dig deeper and find truer sources to meet the crisis. Giving Green is one of the latest players that seek to apply rigorous, critical inquiry to identify and promote what is most likely to make a positive difference in climate change. Their inspired approach to carbon offsets applying the test of “additionality.” Giving Green deems an offset “additional” if its purchase directly leads to reduced emissions that would not have otherwise happened. It is the latest of many iterative layers of improvement in our collective efforts. It follows the lesson of when we know better we must do better.
Smart, well-oriented initiatives like Giving Green are truly hopeful. They promise to make donors and volunteers more like partners than distant benefactors. It is also encouraging to see charities improve their practice by engaging donors with more appreciation. I am working with one client, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, with plans for a world-class stewardship program that sets a new standard.