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[your name]

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I’m not fundraising.

�I’m not pushing a specific cause.

What’s this about?

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How are people feeling about the world?

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Overwhelmed?

So I know when I think about it, I feel pretty overwhelmed. Because there’s a lot going on, right? And it can be really difficult to see so many pressing problems in the world – I’ll just read a few examples. (feel free to pick and choose. You may want to include some of the ones about global health since the talk uses examples in global health later)

We’ve got Climate change, which is set to wreak havoc on the environment and economy
A third of women have suffered from sexual or physical violence https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women#:~:text=Estimates%20published%20by%20WHO%20indicate,sexual%20violence%20in%20their%20lifetime.
Partisanship is increasing, and democracy may be in decline
Currently, about ~1 in 10 people live in extreme poverty https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief
Nearly 6 million children die yearly and most of these deaths are from easily preventable diseases

https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-youth-deaths?tab=chart&country=~OWID_WRL https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/levels-and-trends-in-child-under-5-mortality-in-2020

Over 9000 nuclear warheads are in military service and around 3000 of those are already deployed, the majority of which are sitting on missiles and at bomber bases, ready-to-launchAround 9000 nuclear warheads are battle ready and over 3000 of those are sitting ready-to-launch

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/12/number-of-nuclear-weapons-held-by-major-powers-rising-says-thinktank

Bacteria are becoming antibiotic resistant
AI is getting super powerful and governance isn’t exactly catching up
Our food systems cause suffering to hundreds of billions of land and aquatic animals

I could go on…but I won’t…

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Which usually leads to either:

OR

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We can.

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You can do a tremendous amount of good (and even concretely save lives) if you use your resources effectively.

Premise #1

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Only

1 in 3 people

Did any research before donating

Only

3% of people

Consider a charity’s performance when deciding where to donate

Your donation decisions matter more than you’ve probably considered.

From: “Money for Good”. Hope Consulting, 2010 (p.19)

Premise #2

…we all probably need to think a little bit more carefully about where we donate. Because there are a lot of different charities out there – and they aren’t all doing the same things. So premise #2 is that your donation decision matter more than you’ve probably considered.

Now this is notable because a lot of people tend to lump all charity into one sort of bucket – it’s charity, it’s good. And they might not be thinking very much about the differences between charities. So this could explain why, even though donor behavior hasn’t been studied that much, what we do see from some of the data is that a lot of people don’t really do research when deciding where to donate. These stats come from a 2010 study with a sample size of about 4000 and it found that only 1 in 3 people did any research before donating and only 3% of people gave based on the charity’s performance, so what it was actually accomplishing. So given how common this is, or how uncommon it is to do research before donating, I want to start off with a little activity to help illustrate just how much your donation decisions matter.

��(more about study in case there are questions: So a 2010 study done by Hope Consulting and funded by the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation surveyed over 4000 individuals (with a focus on particularly wealthy individuals) and also did focus interviews with a much smaller group. They found that only 1 in 3 people did any research before donating… And that only 3% of people give based on the performance (things like the effectiveness and impact) of a charity. Images from study are at the end of the presentation in case there are questions.)

https://thegiin.org/assets/binary-data/RESOURCE/download_file/000/000/96-1.pdf

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Would you donate?

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Would you donate?

Impact & cost:

Benefits children in need
Has operated since 1947
It’s programs have positively impacted 281 million children
A donation of $15 provides a tangible benefit

Prominence & acclaim:�

President Biden attended its 2022 event
Was featured at the 99th annual tree lighting in New York and a New York Stock Exchange event

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Toys for Tots

Impact & cost:

~$15 -> a toy to a child in need
Has operated since 1947
It’s programs have impacted over 281 million children

Prominence & acclaim:

President Biden attended its 2022 event
Was featured at the 99th annual tree lighting in New York and a New York Stock Exchange event

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Which would you choose?

Mystery charity

Impact & cost:

Benefits families in need
Has operated since 2013
Its programs have impacted over 515 million people and prevented the deaths of 15,000 children
~50 cents to ~$1.50 provides a tangible benefit, depending on the program

Prominence & acclaim:

Guessing you haven’t heard of it

Toys for Tots

Impact & cost:

Benefits children in need
$15 to achieve benefit
Has operated since 1947
Has impacted over 300 million children

Prominence & acclaim:

President Biden attended its 2022 event
Was featured at the 99th annual tree lighting in New York and a New York Stock Exchange event

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Evidence Action

Four different programs, but let’s talk about Safe Water Now:

Impact & cost:

$1.50 per person per year to provide clean, safe water in at-risk communities
10+ million people reached so far
An estimated 15,000 childhood deaths prevented

Prominence & acclaim:

You probably haven’t heard of it. But:

GiveWell has granted to it
TLYCS recommends it

�

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Waterborne illnesses kill more than

1 million people

each year

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Provide

1 toy

to a child in need

Provide clean,

safe water to ~10

children for a year

With the same $15

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Only

1 in 3 people

Did any research before donating

Only

3% of people

Consider a charity’s performance when deciding where to donate

Your donation decisions matter more than you’ve probably considered.

From: “Money for Good”. Hope Consulting, 2010 (p.19)

Premise #2

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Great stories ⇏ Great results

Sometimes it isn’t obvious

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All the money was invested in something that was

But it turned that not only did this charity fail to help people – it probably made things worse.

There was a 2007 report by UNICEF and a PBS documentary about the fiasco, in which it was revealed that this was really not working out.

There pumps were super inefficient, expensive to install, and constantly breaking down, and in some areas, there were even reports of pumps being out of commission for up to 17 months
Worse, the children got tired of them because they were hard to push and it was often left the village women who had to turn the merry-go-round which they found humiliating
They were also extremely expensive, at the time of the unicef report, it cost about 14,000 to install one pump.
So it’s not that surprising than when asked, many people in communities playpumps was trying to serve said they preferred the hand pumps and were never consulted about the switch.

Okay, so surely this charity is no longer operating, right? Well, while the international version of Playpumps disbanded in 2010, Field’s original South African organisation seems to be still operating today, like they have a LInkedin and a fb page, and they’re installing playpumps in schools in South Africa despite the fact that there are much more cost-effective ways of providing water.

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Great stories ⇏ Great results

Great research = Great results

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So how do we find that research?

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~1.5 million

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

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Q: So how do we find the best giving opportunities?

A: Use impact-focused charity evaluators.

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Buying for ourselves

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Buying for others

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Evidence Action

$15 can provide clean,

safe water to ~10

children for a year

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Toys for Tots

$15 provides

1 toy

to a child in need

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Playpumps

$14,000 will buy

1 water pump

that probably doesn’t work

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Impact-focused evaluators

What they are and how they work

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Impact focused evaluators

Purpose: to find the giving opportunities where donors can do the most good per dollar

Find areas where programs are likely to be impactful
Find programs within those areas that are likely to be particularly cost-effective
Deeply evaluate promising programs

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How is this approach different?

Impact-focused

Evaluates smaller number of programs (those identified as conducting the most promising types of work)
Deeper investigations
Measures what the program achieves and how it compares to other programs
Good for deciding where to donate for maximum impact

Non impact-focused

Ratings for hundreds of charities
More programs to evaluate; can’t go as deep
Weighs easily obtainable metrics (accountability, financial health, transparency) more heavily than impact
Good for making sure a charity isn’t a fraud.

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Efficiency

⇏ Impact

The overhead myth

Massages for millionaires

Playpumps

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How is this approach different?

Impact-focused

Evaluates smaller number of programs
Deeper investigations
Measures what the program achieves and how it compares to other programs
Good for deciding where to donate for maximum impact

Examples: GiveWell, ACE, Founders Pledge

Non impact-focused

Ratings for hundreds of charities
More programs to evaluate; can’t go as deep
Weighs easily obtainable metrics more heavily than impact (accountability, financial health, transparency)
Good for making sure a charity isn’t a fraud.

Examples: Charity Navigator, Guidestar, Charity Watch

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SNT framework for prioritising between problems

Thinking about cost-effectiveness

Two useful tools

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Uncrowded

Big

Find problems

that are:

Tractable

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Big

affecting many lives, by a lot

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Tractable

showing clear ways of making progress

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Uncrowded

greater need for resources

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✅ SNT framework for prioritising between problems

Thinking about cost-effectiveness

Two useful tools

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Finding programs that do a lot with a little

$1.50 to provide clean water per person per year

$14,000 for a PlayPump for a village that is worse than existing handpumps

9300+ people could receive clean water for a year for the cost of 1 PlayPump

VS

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Differences in cost-effectiveness

of different interventions

And this type of variation is not that uncommon –, here are some graphs from several different data sets that examined the cost-effectiveness of different interventions in the same area and you can see how much they vary in cost-effectiveness. Now I want to be very clear: this is not a graph of charities, this is a graph of specific interventions, so you know it’s not directly equivalent to the differences between charities because sometimes there are added costs charities have to incur to perform these interventions, but that said, you can infer that since these huge differences exist in the types of interventions that are effective, then the charities that are doing the really exceptional interventions here, while their programs are likely going to be a lot more cost-effective than a charity implementing one of these interventions, like all else equal.

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Isn’t this mostly applicable to the wealthy?

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Premise #3

You are probably in the top 1-5% of income earners worldwide.

Find out how rich you are on a global scale

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How much do you need to donate to make a difference?

Malaria kills half a million children a year

🛩🛩 = every day

One net costs $5 to purchase and distribute

Even so, maybe it still feels like you’d need to donate kind of a lot to make a difference. And I just want to illustrate how much you can do with kind of a modest amount– basically, there are really cheap, public health interventions that are very underfunded in lower-income countries, so small amounts of money can actually do a surprising amount. We already discussed one example of this – where with Evidence Action’s Safe Water Now program, $1.50 could provide clean water for a year for someone in need. Malaria prevention is another example. It’s a little bit heavy, but I think it’s important to cover, because it’s happening…and it’s a significant issue… but it is one that we can actually make a lot of progress on if there was enough funding. So the heavy part of this is that malaria kills the equivalent of two jumbo jets of children every single day – so that’s like if you opened the newspaper and saw that two planes had crashed and everyone on board had died – that’s every day. But it only costs $5 to get a malaria net to a household in need, and a ton of research has shown that nets are really good at preventing malaria. So this is an example of a problem that is really big, really tractable, really cost-effective, but underfunded bc people are still dying – there’s a lot of people that need nets and don’t have them. And that’s why two of GiveWell (a charity evaluator we looked at earlier) this is why two of their top charities focus on malaria

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$5000 USD can save a life

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~$5000

Cost to save a life in a low and middle income country

~$10,000,000

Cost to save a life in the global north

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What does that break down to?

$5000/24 months = 208.33333

~$200 per month = save a life every two years

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Recap

You are probably in the top 1-5% of income earners worldwide
If you dedicate a portion of your resources effectively, you can achieve a lot with a little.

It isn’t always obvious. Great stories ⇏ great results
Great research = great results

~$200 per month = save a life every two years

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A community that cares

about doing more good

Education/resources�to help people give more effectively

Donation platform�to support high-impact projects

The 🔸10% Pledge �to help make effective giving normal in high-income countries

Great, so all of the info I covered comes from the organisation Giving What We Can – definitely encourage you to check them out at givingwhatwecan.org, there's a QR code here as well – but basically they do three main things as part of their mission to change the norms around charitable giving. So firstly, they offer a bunch of educationresources about how to give more effectively/how to do more with your donation dollars, they also have a donation platform where people can support high-impact projects, and then finally a large part of their mission that I didn’t really touch on today but that I personally have done (if true) is they have something called the 10% pledge which is a public commitment to give at least ten percent of your income to effective charities until you retire - in recognition of this inequality between lower and higher income countries and in recognition that we can actually do a lot with our resources and maybe start to help bridge that gap– so just like we saw before that $200 a month can save a life every two years, taking a pledge can help you live up to that aspiration, if that’s something that you want to do, and it also can help inspire others. And imagine the world we could see if effective giving was normal in high-income countries.Thanks very much for listening, and I’m happy to stick around if anyone wants to chat further! (Oh and I should also mention there are some other pledges you can take at Giving What We Can too – so if you’re like that seems cool but I”m not sure about 10%...they have some other options where you can customise the percentage.)

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Appendix

(Add any helpful links you may want to share)

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But do we?

From: “Money for Good”. Hope Consulting, 2010 (p.19)

1 in 3 people -> any research before donating

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But do we?

From: “Money for Good”. Hope Consulting, 2010 (p. 41)