When it comes to doing good, where you give matters just as much as how much you give. With over a million charities competing for your support, choosing the right charity to donate to can feel overwhelming.
But here’s the good news: with a little guidance, you can make your charity donation go dramatically further. In fact, the best charities can be over 140 times more effective than the average!
So, how do you choose a charity to donate to that really makes a difference?
We’ve collected a few heuristics and shortcuts over the years to make the process easier and more effective at improving lives.
- More than good intentions: give with head and heart.
- Focus on charity impact, not overheads.
- Your money goes further in low-income countries.
- The easy button: use independent charity evaluators.
- Unsure which evaluator? Cast a wide net and diversify donations.
- Support the charity evaluators.
1. More than good intentions: give with head and heart
It’s understandable that people want to support projects close to their hearts. This is especially true if you think we can’t compare charities’ impact, or they’re all about as good as each other. But we can compare charities, and as you might have heard us say (quite a few times…) the differences are staggering.
While we think we should give where it goes furthest, you don’t have to choose between giving to what you’re connected to and what creates the most good.
There’s a simple solution: you can split your donations. Perhaps you give 90% of your yearly donation to effective causes, and put aside 10% for things close to your heart. But certainly, we think some of our giving should be aimed at trying to have the biggest impact. One practical tip if you’re torn between giving to high-impact causes and your favourites, Giving Multiplier is a site that’ll match part of your donation to the super-effective one, with the amount increasing in line with the percentage of your total donation.
And if you’re worried about looking weird – don’t worry. Research finds that donors who give both to their favourite charity and a highly impactful one are viewed as the most competent and warm.
But what things should you look for to find super effective charities?
2. Focus on charity impact, not overheads
Many people judge charities by how little they spend on admin. But that’s the wrong metric. A charity can have rock-bottom overheads and still achieve very little.
Consider a silly example. A charity called “Beers for Barons”. It’s run by volunteers and has no overhead, so 100% of its money goes towards inebriating the peerage.
Such a charity looks great – indeed, flawless – in terms of overheads. But it’s a dubious destination for our charity. That’s because low overhead has little to no relationship with impact.
At the Happier Lives Institute, we evaluate charities based on how many WELLBYs (Wellbeing-Adjusted Life Years) they produce per dollar. In other words, how much they improve people’s lives, and for how long, not just their overheads.
3. Your money goes further in low-income countries
Another very obvious thing that distinguishes most high-impact charities is that they work in low-income countries. This isn’t for a mysterious reason. Costs are lower, and the benefits are often higher.
Imagining the case of cash transfers makes it a clear example of why the most cost-effective charities often work in low-income countries. Giving someone a small amount of money—say, $50—has a vastly different impact depending on where they live. In a high-income country, $50 might cover a nice dinner or part of a utility bill. But in a low-income country, $50 can represent a significant share of someone’s monthly income. It can help a family buy enough food for weeks, pay school fees, repair a roof, or invest in a small business. Because people in low-income settings often face severe financial constraints, even modest transfers can lead to large improvements in wellbeing.
Also, the cost of delivering cash transfers (or any programme for that matter) is lower in low-income countries. Salaries and labour costs, the principal input into most projects, are lower (this is literally why they are called ‘low-income countries’).
Ok, perhaps at this stage you are thinking that this all sounds like a lot of work. You have to find a charity working in a lower-middle income country, and then work out its impact rather than using something simple like overheads. You have a life to live and a job to do! This sounds like a whole full-time second job. Well, it would be and then some. But fortunately for you, there is an easier option…
4. The easy button: Use independent charity evaluators
Unless you’d rather spend your free time buried in charity records and academic papers, we recommend using an expert charity evaluator. These organisations are like the Wirecutter for donating. They have already done the hard work by pouring over the data for you, weighing the evidence, and identifying the most effective charities. Even better is that this work is free for the public! We’re naturally a fan of this approach, since this is the reason why we exist.
But there are many more charity evaluators than us, each with a unique speciality. Our focus – as the name gives away – is finding the best organisations for increasing wellbeing. But others specialise on topics like saving lives (e.g., GiveWell), animal welfare (Animal Charity Evaluators) or climate change (Giving Green). Now, if you’re wondering how to give across different evaluators – that’s a hard question, which we turn to in the next point.
5. Unsure which evaluator? Cast a wide net and diversify donations
There is now a huge wealth of information out there about different charities, and it can feel overwhelming. How do you pick whether to support life-improving, life-saving, animal or environmental charities?
Well, one easy solution is to split your donations between these causes. You can weigh up for yourself how important you think each of these causes is and then split your money accordingly.
For example, perhaps you are vegan and think improving lives is more important than extending them. You might therefore choose to split your donations between some animal charities recommended by ACE (Animal Charity Evaluators) and life-improving charities recommended by us at the Happier Lives Institute.
6. Support the charity evaluators
Yes, this is the unsexy part, but it really matters.
Charity evaluators like us at HLI (and others like GiveWell or The Life You Can Save) spend thousands of hours researching where donations do the most good. That work is free to the public, but it isn’t free to produce. So if you’ve benefited from an evaluator’s research (i.e. if it helped you make a smarter donation), consider supporting the people behind it.
And we try to practice what we preach – we’ve been evaluated and estimated to also be cost-effective because we multiply the impact by expanding the reach of ideas about effective giving.
When you donate through an evaluator’s platform, there’s often a checkbox that says something like “add 10% to support their work.” If the research helped you, tick the box. It will ensure us evaluators can keep finding these incredible opportunities to help you and other donors make the world a better place!
How to find the best charity to donate to
You don’t need to be a full-time researcher to give effectively; let us evaluators do that work! But by utilising the tremendous amount of research we’ve put together, you can massively increase your impact in an instant. Whether you follow a trusted evaluator’s advice or split your donation using a tool like Giving Multiplier, the key is to move from feel-good giving to do-good giving.
At the end of the day, your donation is a chance to shape the world for the better. So choose wisely because the better you give, the better others live.
Contribute to the Happier Lives Institute’s work
If this approach resonates with you, if you want to make the world happier, not just healthier or wealthier, we’d love for you to join us.
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