Why some charities are 1000 times more impactful
Key takeaways:
- Most people think all charities do roughly the same amount of good. In surveys, donors estimate that the best charities are only 3x more effective than average.
- However, when we undertook the first global comparison of charities, we found stark differences: the best charities create hundreds, even thousands, of times more wellbeing per dollar than others.
- In this post, we explain why our current best guess is that giving $1,000 to the best charities has about the same impact as giving $1m to ‘standard’ charities – a 1,000-fold difference.
1. What do people think about the differences between charities?
We asked people what they think the difference is between the best and average charities in terms of happiness per dollar donated. The results of this survey found that people believe the best charity is 3x better than the average charity at creating happiness.
This gap in perception explains why few people actively search for cost-effectiveness data – if you think all charities are about equal, there’s no reason to shop around.
But are charities about the same? How would you even answer this question?
How do we find the best charities? By measuring what really matters (wellbeing) and finding which charities create the most wellbeing per dollar (cost-effectiveness).
Traditional charity evaluations measure what charities do – how many meals served, schools built, or cash transfers made. We measure something different: how these activities improve people’s lives as they actually experience them.
We do this using WELLBYs (wellbeing-adjusted life years). One WELLBY represents a one-point increase on a 0–10 wellbeing scale, sustained for one person for one year. For example, raising someone’s life satisfaction from 5/10 to 7/10 for a year = 2 WELLBYs. For more about what the WELLBY is and how we measure it, see our WELLBY explainer.
Then we can calculate the cost-effectiveness of a charity at producing WELLBYs.
This method is endorsed and now used by the UK and New Zealand Treasuries.
2. Do we actually know how much better the best charities are?
Until recently, the “some charities are 100x better” claim was often made, but never really put to the test. To our knowledge, we’ve provided the most direct evidence supporting this claim.
We carried out what is, as far as we know, the first global comparison of charity cost-effectiveness. This was first published in the World Happiness Report (2025) and we’ve since turned it into a Living Review. The original analysis brought together 24 charity evaluations (two of which are back-of-the-envelope calculations), now having increased to 30 analyses, covering issues from mental health and nutrition to guide dogs. Some were done by us, the Happier Lives Institute, the rest by others using the same approach. The impact of each charity is calculated using the impact in WELLBYs, the cost, and the cost-effectiveness.
In the figure below we show all the charities and their cost-effectiveness in terms of how many WELLBYs are produced per $1,000 donated (higher is better).
This does not clearly show how much less cost-effective typical charities in high-income countries are. So we also show you the results in terms of cost to create a WELLBY (smaller is better), the amount of dollars needed to donate to a charity to create the same amount of wellbeing.
3. What was the real gap?
A number of organisations provide deworming pills at scale, including the four evaluated by GiveWell discussed above.
We evaluated the impact of deworming as an intervention in general, rather than a specific organisation or programme, so our analysis applies across all such organisations.
In our analysis, the differences between charities were extraordinary:
- Across groups: The average of our top 5 charities was 151x more cost-effective than the average of those working in high-income countries.
- Across individual charities: The most effective charity in our sample, Pure Earth, was 916x more cost-effective than the least effective charity in the sample that was not a BOTEC, Football Beyond Borders.
However, we think the 151x figure is likely a substantial underestimate. This was a sample of organisations that have volunteers to participate in an external evaluation of their work, using a new method – wellbeing analysis – so we expect these charities are substantially better than the average charity people give to.
So, we set out to look beyond the sample for some charities that we think are closer to average charitable giving.
We did a shallow evaluation of Guide Dogs UK, not only because primarily because they are a well-known charity, but because they effectively do one thing – provide guide dogs for people with visual impairments. This makes it easy to think about their cost-effectiveness because, as we’ve written elsewhere, it’s basically impossible for us to assess charities that do lots of different things, which we call ‘MANGOs’, standing for ‘multi-armed NGOs.
According to their annual report and accounts for 2023, they spent £73.9 million on guide dog services, and in this time they trained 469 new guide dogs. From this, we can estimate that training each dog costs nearly $200,000. Each dog has an average service time of 7 years, and we estimate that each year of service improves life satisfaction by 0.69 points (based on a mini meta-analysis of three studies), for a total of 4.83 WELLBYs. Therefore, despite the high individual wellbeing gains guide dogs produce, the high costs of training mean we estimate it costs over $40,000 per WELLBY. This makes Pure Earth over 3,000x more cost-effective.
We also looked at a couple of interventions to help the homeless. We found one study that provided “housing first”, which had a total effect of 0.67 WELLBYs per person (initially 0.67, assumed to last one year before dropping to zero) and a cost per person of around $23,000, implying a cost of $35,028 per WELLBY. Another study, which looked at unconditional cash transfers, had a total impact of 0.33 WELLBYs per person (initially 0.33, decaying over two years) and a cost per person of $6,667, giving us a cost of $19,994 per WELLBY.
The difference between Pure Earth, the most cost-effective charity in the sample, and the average of these more typical charities in high-income countries is 3366x. So, by somewhat splitting the difference, and giving some relevance to the latter comparison, we get a general round figure of 1,000x.
We should caveat that all these numbers are estimates, and they could move around quite a bit on closer examination. But what we don’t expect to change is the general picture that there are staggering differences in impact between charities. Especially if we’re comparing the best charities globally to ‘standard’ charities: the typical charities operating in high-income countries, which is what donors from said countries tend to give to.
4. How can some charities be 1,000 times more effective than others?
The gap sounds absurd until you look at where the money goes. The same improvement in someone’s wellbeing can cost wildly different amounts depending on the setting and the type of help offered. Two forces drive the difference: (1) where the intervention is delivered, and (2) what the intervention actually is.
- Location matters: the same service can cost 20–30 times less in low-income countries.
Take therapy. In the UK, the NHS’s IAPT programme costs roughly £650 per person (around $1,200 after inflation and conversion). StrongMinds delivers a very similar group-based programme in Uganda for about $45. That’s a ~25x difference for potentially similar benefits. - But the biggest gaps come from comparing entirely different types of help.
Within mental health, the cost range is already large, but across cause areas the differences explode. Some interventions are simply much more resource-intensive than others without producing commensurately greater wellbeing gains.
Guide dogs (as discussed earlier) illustrate the point. A guide dog transforms a blind person’s life – but so does effective depression treatment for someone with severe symptoms. The costs, however, are very different. Training and supporting a single guide dog costs around $200,000. That’s over 4,000x the cost of providing therapy in Uganda.
The lesson is clear: there are many genuine ways to help others, but some are so much cheaper than others that the difference is hard to fathom.
5. What does this all mean?
What survey of perceptions show is that people don’t think it really matters where you give: the best charities are only a couple of times better than the rest. However, the data confirm what proponents of effective giving have long suggested: some charities are hundreds or even thousands of times more effective than others.
For donors, this has the startling conclusion that you could be enormously more impactful, at no extra cost to yourself, just by changing where you give. It also means your impact depends far more on where you give than how much you give. It’s far more important to give better, rather than give more.
For researchers, it highlights the value of wellbeing-based evaluations, which compare interventions in a common human currency and expose differences invisible to traditional metrics.
In short:
Money can buy happiness for others. If you choose wisely, you can buy extraordinary amounts of it.