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Giving Game

[ group name ]

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[Your Name]

[Your Role]

Your Photo

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Turn to the person next to you

What is your name and why are you here?

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Some important

assumptions

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Everyday giving scenarios

Charity decisions are often fast, without much information

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What are we going to do today?

Today, we’re going to do a few things.

We’re going to begin testing your own intuitions for comparing charities right away. To start with we’re going to ask you to pick a charity in the way many donors do, without much information. So in a moment, I’m going to provide a code so you can all log in to our Giving Games platform and vote on the charity you’d choose. For this first vote, you’ll see 3 charities. No real money will be involved for this first vote, but it will help us test how we’d spend our money when we have very little information.

Then, for about 15 minutes, i’ll share some ideas about charity evaluation and high-impact giving.

Then, the main part of this event is going to require us to work together. We’ll look at each of the charities from the first vote in more detail, and discuss and decide as a group how we spend our shared pot of money. We’ve got X amount per person to spend.

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[ ]

1. Go to

game.givingwhatwecan.org

2. Type in this group code

3. Answer short survey

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Our charities

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Default options

The following three charities we’ve selected as a good default set of options for an introductory Giving Game.

For presenters only - delete or hide from presentation

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GiveDirectly

Send cash unconditionally (no strings attached) directly to poor households in low-income countries primarily via mobile phone-linked payment services

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Evidence Action: Safe Water Now

Delivers free and reliable safe water access through chlorination

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PlayPumps

Innovative way to provide drinking water in impoverished rural communities by using the energy created by children playing to operate a water pump

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Against Malaria Foundation

Provide long-lasting insecticidal nets to populations at high risk of malaria, primarily in Africa.

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Preliminary Vote

At a glance, which would you support?

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Turn to the person next to you

Which organisation did you vote for and what was your best argument for doing so?

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~1.5 million

Charities and non-profits registered in the US as of 2022

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Opportunity cost

In a world of limited resources, money donated to one charity is money that could have been donated to another charity

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⅓

of people do any�research before giving

Hope Consulting (May 2010).

Many estimate that the best charities are

1.5-2x

more effective than an average charity

Judgment and Decision Making (July 2020)

3%

give based on performance

Hope Consulting (May 2010)

How much do donation decisions matter?

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You can 100x your impact

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Where do these big differences come from?

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Minimize overhead

Make as much of the money as possible go to the services that the charity delivers.

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Massages for millionaires

Imagine a charity

The takeaway:

Efficiency ≠ effectiveness

100% of its intervention is donated
Entirely volunteer run
Only small costs
$1 donation results in
$100 of intervention given to recipients

Is it effective at improving the world?

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Cost effectiveness

How much “good” can we get for the money we donate

Benefit

➗

Cost

Instead of efficiency, we are better off looking at cost effectiveness,

Cost effectiveness is a measure of how much “good” we can get for the money we donate.

For example, if your goal is to improve health you have lots of interventions to choose from: you could provide one of many medicines, surgeries, or therapies. You could try improving environmental conditions such as reducing pollution or improving the quality of accommodations.

To make “cost-effectivenesss” more concrete, we will look at some numbers from the World Bank on interventions working on waterborne illnesses.

Sanitation is very important. It's not something we think about that much in rich countries, but unsafe water is responsible for the deaths of over a million people each year, and around 1000 children every single day.

�https://www.who.int/news/item/28-06-2023-improving-access-to-water--sanitation-and-hygiene-can-save-1.4-million-lives-per-year--says-new-who-report�https://www.unicef.org/media/137206/file/triple-threat-wash-EN.pdf

https://ourworldindata.org/clean-water�

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Years of healthy life per $1,000 USD

Piped water + flushing toilets

~6 months

according to the World Bank’s Disease Control Priorities Third Edition (DCP3) in 2017

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Household chlorination

Years of healthy life per $1,000 USD

Piped water + flushing toilets

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Zinc added to oral rehydration

Household chlorination

Years of healthy life per $1,000 USD

Piped water + flushing toilets

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Household chlorination

Years of healthy life per $1,000 USD

Piped water + flushing toilets

Zinc added to oral rehydration

Treatment of severe malaria with artesunate

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Household chlorination

Years of healthy life per $1,000 USD

Piped water + flushing toilets

Zinc added to oral rehydration

Treatment of severe malaria with artesunate

New cancer drugs

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Years of healthy life per $1,000 USD

Based upon the Economic Evaluation Results from Disease Control Priorities, 3rd Edition (2017)

The differences in cost-effectiveness can be incredible, and they typically seem to follow very skewed distributions, so picking at random will likely result in missing out on a lot of good.

Here’s a graph of the cost-effectiveness of different interventions in global health from the Disease Control Priorities 3rd edition report. Importantly, an intervention is not the same as a charity, so this graph isn’t literally showing the differences between charities. However, because interventions do vary so much in cost-effectiveness, this means that charities will also vary considerably, depending on which programs they operate. So remember, the huge differences in charity effectiveness don’t tend to come from trivial things like administrative costs or staff salaries. They almost always come from the kinds of interventions the charities pursue – it’s important to find those high-impact interventions because lives are on the line.

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“A single death is a tragedy;�a million deaths is a statistic”

are a million tragedies!!!

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The story of PlayPumps

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PlayPumps

Innovative way to provide drinking water in impoverished rural communities by using the energy created by children playing to operate a water pump

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Received lots of praise and funding

Recipient of the World Bank Development Marketplace Award
Clinton Global Initiative ceremony, donors pledged $16.4 million to install more PlayPumps

However, it didn’t work

Less efficient than hand pumps
Not fun to play with
Ended up discarded

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How could the PlayPumps situation been prevented?

Group discussion

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Turn to the person next to you

Have you ever seen a social impact project “gone wrong”?

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Listen to the recipients of aid

Contrast with…

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Finding a high impact charity

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Cause prioritisation

Charity evaluation

Find charities solving problems that are:

Big�Affecting many lives, by a lot
Tractable�Clear ways to make progress
Uncrowded�Lots of low hanging fruit

When assessing charities, look for:

Cost-effectiveness�Benefits for the money spent
Strong evidence/reasoning�Scientific, systematic
Theory of change�Logical and robust reasoning
Transparency�Open, clear

The most promising problems are generally bigger, more tractable, and less crowded.

A problem is bigger if it affects more lives, affects lives more significantly, or both.

For example, curing a rare disease is good, but curing a common one is even better because more people are affected.

Similarly, curing a disease which causes a small irritation would be good, but curing a disease which causes a lot of suffering would be better because it affects people more.

More tractable problems show clear ways of making progress. There’s a known solution, or a path forward. All else being equal, we’d rather work on something where it’s possible to get a lot done.

Finally, less crowded problems are fantastic opportunities because a popular problem may be already getting a lot of resources.

This is true especially for things that make the news - a rare or surprising problem may already get a lot of attention, while ongoing problems like “lots of people still have malaria” get less media attention exactly because they are so common (they’re not news). And yet this is exactly what makes them important to work on.

So you may be able to do more good by finding opportunities that aren’t already getting a lot of attention.

It’s hard to score well on all three of these, so it’s about finding a balance. For example, a problem may be difficult to address but also extremely important, important enough that we should work on it despite the difficulty.

–

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 be transparent.

We go through the basics of selecting a charity at givingwhatwecan.org/choosing-a-charity

…but fortunately there are two promising ways to rely on experts who have done the work for you. We recommend you use… (continued on next slide)

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Rules-of-thumb for…

Prioritising between social issues

Find organisations solving problems that are:

Important - big (or significant) effects

Tractable - clear ways of making progress

Neglected - Lots of low-hanging fruit �

First, it’s good to look the problem they’re working on. What are they trying to change?

A really useful framework here is the ITN framework – It suggests you consider three things: importance, tractability, and neglectedness

So for important: you probably want to prioritise an organisation which is dealing with an important problem. A problem might be important if it affects many lives or if it affects lives significantly. For example, curing a rare disease is amazing, but curing a common one which affect lots of people is even better.

Coming to tractability: More tractable problems show clear ways of making progress. There’s a known solution, or a path forward. All else being equal, we’d rather work on something where it’s possible to get a lot done.

Finally, how neglected is the problem in terms of much money, people, power, talent is going towards it? Generally, you might be able to do more by focusing on problems that aren’t getting a lot of attention…because they really need resources

It’s hard to score well on all three of these, so it’s about finding a balance. For example, a problem may be difficult to address but also extremely important, important enough that we should work on it despite the difficulty.

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Charity evaluation?

When assessing charities, look for:

Cost-effectiveness�Benefits for the money spent
Strong evidence

Scientific evidence

Theoretical evidence

Transparency�Open, clear

Rules-of-thumb for…

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Charity evaluators

Within cause areas there are organizations tasked with finding the best opportunities for giving

So impact-focused charity evaluators are organisations that have sprung up in the last 10-20 years and whose mission is to find the best donation opportunities. They assess charities based on how effectively they use donations. One example is GiveWell, whose research Giving What We Can uses to inform its charity recommendations within global health. There are also impact-focused evaluators working in other areas, for example: Animal Charity Evaluators in the animal welfare space, Founders Pledge which evaluates across many cause areas, and Giving Green which is working in the climate space, that donors might want to check out. If you care about effectiveness, it’s good to use an evaluator that prioritises concepts like cost-effectiveness and impact, which we discussed in the previous slide. Many well known charity evaluators (Charity Navigator, Guidestar) focus more on an organisation’s financial health and overhead costs, which isn’t as indicative of impact.

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Expert grantmakers

Donors can pool funds together to find and fund outstanding giving opportunities

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Two broad approaches to giving

Strongly evidence-backed, low risk

Many interventions fail in counterintuitive ways
Often supported by randomized control trials

Hits-based

Some of the best philanthropic efforts were moonshots

The Green Revolution
Oral contraception

Don’t try to maximize your impact with certainty, do so in expectation

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Virtuous cycle of effective giving

Easier for donors to make decisions, more effective charities

Donors give based on effectiveness

Increased demand for effectiveness

Greater availability, standardization of effectiveness information

Charities are incentivised to measure, report, and optimise for effectiveness

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A community that cares

about doing more good

~9000�people around the world giving at least 10% of income to high-impact charities

$350 million+�donated to effective charities

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Commitment�Stick to your goals

Community�Get support from others

Culture�Inspire effective giving norms

We find that a public pledge can help us to do even more good than we might do by donating alone for three main reasons: commitment, community and culture.�

Making public commitments helps us to live up to our values and stick with the goals we may otherwise let slide.
Joining a community provides us with support and advice that helps us to follow through with our commitments to help others.
Taking a public pledge helps inspire others to follow our example. Together we can forge a world in which giving effectively and significantly is a cultural norm.

Personally, I’ve found committing to use my income to help others has brought a lot of meaning to my life – I know I'm accomplishing something I care about.

Plus I've met a lot of really caring people who are making a difference in the world. That's a great thing to surround yourself with.

[ Add a personal story here if appropriate around why you pledge or give ]

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Why give more?

howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org

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Today’s charities

What problems are they solving and�how good are they at solving them?

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[charity]

[charity description]

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[charity]

Why this cause?

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[charity]

Why evidence is behind the charity?

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Default options

In the default game, we skip talking more about PlayPumps as we’ve already spoken about them as an example of things going wrong.

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Against Malaria Foundation

Provide long-lasting insecticidal nets to populations at high risk of malaria, primarily in Africa.

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Against Malaria Foundation

What cause are they working on?

200+ million cases of malaria yearly
~90 countries
94% of all cases are in Africa
95% of all malaria deaths are in Africa
70% of all deaths are children under five
One death per two minutes

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Against Malaria Foundation

What evidence is behind the charity?

Impact-focused evaluation (GiveWell top charity)
Highly cost-effective - GW estimates $5500 / life saved; $5 to purchase and distribute one net
The Cochrane meta-study (23 RCTS) found ITNs significantly reduce malaria cases and death (found 17% reduction in 0-5 deaths)

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Against Malaria Foundation

What evidence is behind the charity?

WHO recommends ITN campaigns
Nets prevented 450 million cases of malaria from 2000-2015�Bhatt, S et al. (2015)
AMF conducts post-distribution surveys/follow-up

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GiveDirectly

Send cash unconditionally (no strings attached) directly to poor households in low-income countries primarily via mobile phone-linked payment services

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GiveDirectly

What cause are they working on?

~700 million people around the world live in extreme poverty, less than $2.90 per day (PPP adjusted)
It would take just $258 billion to move everyone above this poverty line.
In 2022, the world spent close to that amount in global aid to low/lower middle income countries.

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GiveDirectly

What evidence is behind the charity?

GW top charity from 2012-2022, but they have since raised their cost-effectiveness bar

Cash transfers as a benchmark -> GW top charities must be 2x more cost-effective

Several Open Philanthropy grants

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GiveDirectly

What evidence is behind the charity?

Research on cash transfers is overwhelmingly positive as a tool for poverty alleviation

Cash transfer recipients tend to spend on items like food, medicine, education, entrepreneurial initiatives, agriculture, roofs, etc.

2016 meta-study: negative effect on total expenditure of temptation goods

Evans & Popova, 2016

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GiveDirectly

What evidence is behind the charity?

Food (19%+)
Protein (39%+)
Staple items (10%+)
Medical (38 %+)
Education (23 %+)
Social (56 %+)
Temptation Goods (Negligible)

Haushofer and Shapiro 2016

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GiveDirectly

Some evidence of other benefits:

Increased psychological wellbeing
Increased school attendance
Improved health

Haushofer and Shapiro 2016�Amarante et al, 2011�Pega et al., 2022

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Evidence Action: Safe Water Now

Delivers free and reliable safe water access through chlorination

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Evidence Action: Safe Water Now

What cause are they working on?

Over 2 billion people lack access to water that is safe to drink
Unsafe water is responsible for more than one million deaths each year
Unsafe drinking water is a leading risk factor for infectious diseases, exacerbates malnutrition, and is the most common cause of diarrhoea — the world’s second-leading cause of child mortality.

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Evidence Action: Safe Water Now

What evidence is behind the charity?

According to the World Health Organization, treating water with diluted chlorine is a safe and effective way to improve water quality
Safe Water Now reports reaching nearly 10 million people with safe water access and having saved the lives of more than 15,000 children under 5 years old.

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Evidence Action: Safe Water Now

What evidence is behind the charity?

It costs about $1.50 to provide clean water for one person for an entire year.
The impact-focused charity evaluator GiveWell has granted to the program.

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Charity discussions

How important are the problems they are working to solve?

How big is the problem?
How tractable is the problem?
How uncrowded is the problem?

How good are they at solving them?

How cost-effective are they?
How strong is the evidence they have?
How robust is the reasoning?
How transparent and open are they?

We’re now going to split into groups and discuss today’s charities. Discuss how well they compare using the cause and charity selection criteria we went over earlier. [If using the default charities or all “highly impactful” charities]: Now I want to just clarify right off the bat that all of the charities we’re voting on today are doing really good work, they are not at all similar to PlayPumps which was doing harm, and they are also above average in terms of their cost-effectiveness. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still debate their relative merits.

�Note to organiser: Important that it’s clear by the end of the discussion that AMF is estimated to be at least 2x more cost-effective than GD. However, there may still be good reasons for people to vote for GD, such as increased agency/empowerment of the recipients. Aid recipients don’t typically get to choose how funds intended to help them are spent, and GD fills an important gap here by empowering people to use the aid for exactly what they need. Re: GD’s cost-effectiveness, this is a good opportunity to bring up how money goes much further overseas.

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Final vote

Which are you voting for?

After voting please continue on to finish the survey and indicate when you are ready.

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And the winner is...

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Next steps

Learn more

Learn more about how to choose effective charities at Giving What We Can → scan the code!!

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Thank you!

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Appendix

Slides that can be used in variations of the game

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Effective Giving and Greek Life

Communities differ in their needs, and the most visible and most accessible are not always the most needy.

Campus funds and large charities are often the ones with the greatest ability to reach out to national Greek Life organizations or individual chapters.

Effective giving is committing your organization to charities which, dollar-for-dollar, effect the most change.

Because Greek Life cares so much about inclusivity, it is essential that charities outside of the general public’s eyes are considered.

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Charity Slides

PLEASE NOTE: �These slides have been added over the years by many different organisers and are not necessarily up to date nor are they all currently recommended by GWWC.�Current charities available for sponsorship are listed on givingwhatwecan.org/charities

Slides that introduce the charity in more detail

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Against Malaria Foundation

Provide long-lasting insecticidal nets to populations at high risk of malaria, primarily in Africa.

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Against Malaria Foundation

What cause are they working on?

200+ million cases of malaria yearly
~90 countries
94% of all cases are in Africa
95% of all malaria deaths are in Africa
70% of all deaths are children under five
One death per two minutes

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Against Malaria Foundation

What evidence is behind the charity?

Impact-focused evaluation (GiveWell top charity)
Highly cost-effective - GW estimates $5500 / life saved; $5 to purchase and distribute one net
The Cochrane meta-study (23 RCTS) found ITNs significantly reduce malaria cases and death (found 17% reduction in 0-5 deaths)

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Against Malaria Foundation

What evidence is behind the charity?

WHO recommends ITN campaigns
Nets prevented 450 million cases of malaria from 2000-2015�Bhatt, S et al. (2015)
AMF conducts post-distribution surveys/follow-up

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GiveDirectly

Send cash unconditionally (no strings attached) directly to poor households in low-income countries primarily via mobile phone-linked payment services

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GiveDirectly

What cause are they working on?

~700 million people around the world live in extreme poverty, less than $2.90 per day (PPP adjusted)
It would take just $258 billion to move everyone above this poverty line.
In 2022, the world spent close to that amount in global aid to low/lower middle income countries.

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GiveDirectly

What evidence is behind the charity?

GW top charity from 2012-2022, but they have since raised their cost-effectiveness bar

Cash transfers as a benchmark -> GW top charities must be 2x more cost-effective

Several Open Philanthropy grants

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GiveDirectly

What evidence is behind the charity?

Research on cash transfers is overwhelmingly positive as a tool for poverty alleviation

Cash transfer recipients tend to spend on items like food, medicine, education, entrepreneurial initiatives, agriculture, roofs, etc.

2016 meta-study: negative effect on total expenditure of temptation goods

Evans & Popova, 2016

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GiveDirectly

Some evidence of other benefits:

Increased psychological wellbeing
Increased school attendance
Improved health

Haushofer and Shapiro 2016�Amarante et al, 2011�Pega et al., 2022

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Evidence Action: Safe Water Now

Delivers free and reliable safe water access through chlorination

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Evidence Action: Safe Water Now

What cause are they working on?

Over 2 billion people lack access to water that is safe to drink
Unsafe water is responsible for more than one million deaths each year
Unsafe drinking water is a leading risk factor for infectious diseases, exacerbates malnutrition, and is the most common cause of diarrhoea — the world’s second-leading cause of child mortality.

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Evidence Action: Safe Water Now

What evidence is behind the charity?

According to the World Health Organization, treating water with diluted chlorine is a safe and effective way to improve water quality
Safe Water Now reports reaching nearly 10 million people with safe water access and having saved the lives of more than 15,000 children under 5 years old.

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Evidence Action: Safe Water Now

What evidence is behind the charity?

It costs about $1.50 to provide clean water for one person for an entire year.
The impact-focused charity evaluator GiveWell has granted to the program.

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Note: video is from 2020

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Development Media International

Run evidence-based media campaigns to change behaviours and improve lives in low-income countries.