In our last blog post, we argued that the effective giving movement, where people donate to more impactful charities, is just getting started. Despite growing interest, it still represents a tiny share of charitable donations and we think there’s huge untapped potential to grow that pie.
But how is the Happier Lives Institute different from other actors in the effective giving space?
A large part of the reason we got started was this: we looked at what other organisations in the effective giving movement were doing, and thought something was missing. Why was no one trying to work out how much charities increase people’s happiness, and recommend the best ones? For many of us, the ultimate goal of giving is to help others live happier lives.
That naturally raises a question we hear a lot:
Why focus on happiness? Why not stick with more traditional outcomes like health or income?
The short answer? We think happiness is a better guide to what really matters and we think it matters to more people, which will grow the effective giving movement.
1. We’re part of the effective giving movement
What is effective giving?
Effective giving is prioritising charitable donations towards high-impact causes.
If you’ve been around the effective giving space, you’ve likely come across organisations like GiveWell or Founders Pledge. Like us, they want to do the most good with the resources we have. And honestly, we have a lot in common.
But at the Happier Lives Institute, we’re not just here for a long time, we’re here for a good time.
That’s because instead of measuring progress in terms of health and wealth, we measure it in happiness. Our approach is grounded in a simple idea: if we want to know how well someone’s life is going, we should ask them.
2. Why not use health and income to measure wellbeing?
Health and income are useful, but imperfect, proxies for wellbeing.
Take health metrics like Disability- and Quality-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs and QALYs). These have become workhorse measures of impact in health for the last couple of decades. The problem? They’re based on asking people to imagine what life would be like with a particular condition. But research shows we’re really bad at this. People tend to underestimate how bad mental illness is and overestimate how bad physical conditions are. For example, the impact of moderate depression on life satisfaction is ten times worse than having a limp yet you’d never guess that from QALY estimates. In other words, we’re not that good at putting ourselves in other people’s shoes.
As for income, the so-called Easterlin Paradox shows that beyond a certain point, rising incomes don’t make us much happier, especially in wealthy countries. And relative income often matters more than absolute income.
If you really pushed us we’d say, okay, sure yes a rising tide will eventually lift all boats. But we don’t want to wait for the ice caps to melt to make the world happier.
The basic idea is: if we want to know how life is going for someone, why not ask them?
3. A new approach, and a new audience
Focusing on happiness lets us measure impact more directly. That’s why we use WELLBYs (wellbeing-adjusted life years), a unit that reflects how much someone’s life satisfaction improves, and for how long.
But happiness also helps us reach new audiences. Our contribution to the World Happiness Report helped introduce effective giving to thousands of people who care about mental health and emotional wellbeing but might never have heard of DALYs or cost-effectiveness ratios.
A recent survey found that mental health ranks second in donation priorities for the US public, just behind cancer, and ahead of global health or poverty. If even a fraction of those people embraced effective giving, it could be transformative.
4. How we are different
If you’re a donor who just wants to make a difference, it can be confusing to learn there are multiple charity evaluators out there, each with their own methods, metrics, and recommended causes. Should you follow GiveWell? Founders Pledge? Happier Lives Institute? Giving Green?
Let’s break it down simply. Some evaluators have a broad remit and often rely on others for their research, and others focus on a specific area and do considerable research themselves.
Multi-cause charity evaluators:
- Charity Navigator has traditionally helped donors evaluate a huge range of charities based on financial transparency and accountability. While that’s important, it doesn’t necessarily tell you which charities are most effective at improving lives. However, they’ve recently started highlighting cost-effective charities across multiple domains.
- Founders Pledge takes a broad view, recommending charities across a wide range of causes including global health, climate change, and animal welfare. They often rely on other charity evaluators such as GiveWell for specialist cause areas, drawing on external research to inform their portfolio.
Evaluators with a focus on human wellbeing:
- The Happier Lives Institute (that’s us) focuses on happiness and mental wellbeing.
We use a metric called the WELLBY (wellbeing-adjusted life year) to identify the charities that do the most to improve people’s lives, based on how people actually feel. We aim to find the most cost-effective ways to make people’s lives go better, emotionally and experientially—not just longer or richer. - GiveWell focuses on saving lives and increasing incomes, mostly through health interventions. They mostly recommend charities that save lives. They use more conventional metrics like DALYs averted and income increases, and are best known for recommending charities that distribute malaria nets or provide deworming treatments. We highly respect GiveWell’s rigorous approach, we just focus on different outcomes and have ended up in a different lane.
- The Life You Can Save curates a list of recommended charities that fight extreme poverty, based on evidence and cost-effectiveness. Inspired by Peter Singer’s philosophy, they target a multidimensional measure of poverty and often feature GiveWell’s top charities alongside other vetted options.
- The Happier Lives Institute (that’s us) focuses on happiness and mental wellbeing.
Evaluators with a focus on animal welfare:
- Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) identifies the most effective ways to reduce animal suffering, primarily focusing on farmed animals. They evaluate charities based on impact, cost-effectiveness, and room for more funding, making them a go-to for donors who prioritise animal welfare.
Evaluators with a focus on climate change:
- Giving Green is focused specifically on climate impact, helping donors find evidence-backed ways to reduce carbon emissions and tackle climate change. If climate is your top priority, they’re a strong option.
So, which one should you choose?
That depends on what you care about.
If you want to maximise happiness, HLI is for you.
If you want to save lives, GiveWell is probably your best bet.
And if your focus is climate or animal welfare, Giving Green or ACE (Animal Charity Evaluators) are great resources.
If you’re interested in a diverse portfolio or want guidance across causes, Founders Pledge can help you navigate that. You can also use the Giving What We Can platform to easily diversify your donations.
While we think it’s important to value happiness, we’re glad to be part of a growing ecosystem of evidence-based charity evaluators.
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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Let’s make happiness count.