Support our research
Why donate to the Happier Lives Institute?
By donating to the Happier Lives Institute, you’ll be:
Supporting novel, important research
We’re leading the charge on finding the best, evidenced-based ways to make lives better. This includes groundbreaking investigations into causes, charities, and foundational issues. There’s much to do.
Supporting outreach to donors and decision-makers
By sharing our research, we allow people to make a bigger difference than they would have otherwise. Funding us is a leverage opportunity: rather than giving directly to a charity, you can fund us to spread the word and help others have more impact.
Ensuring we stay impartial
We never take commission from the charities we recommend. We’re proud to be unbiased – but that does mean we’re fully reliant on donations made to us directly.
Protecting a unique mission
Sadly, there are no other charity evaluators that ‘take happiness seriously’ in the way we do. Without funding, we won’t be able to continue our mission.
Getting transparent results
We’re open about our levels of confidence, mistakes we’ve made, and areas where we need to improve.
Growing the wellbeing revolution
We’re one of the only organisations pushing for the world to start using happiness as a measure of success. And now, even the UK and New Zealand governments are measuring happiness.
The main assumptions in the IPA analysis were:
- HLI’s research has successfully identified charities several times more cost-effective than cash transfers.
- Our outreach would lead to donors switch from charities as good as cash transfers to our top charities
- We were on track to move $10m a year by 2029 (we hope we exceed this!). They also considered our running costs.
The reason we take the IPA conclusion with a pinch of salt is because our work is less scalable than the charities we recommend. We do think we’re the best buy per dollar (otherwise we’d be doing something else), but only up to a point.
If we receive funding to fill our budget for the next 18 months, we will publicly declare this, and donate the funds to our top recommended charities.
For more details, see the full IPA Right-Fit Evidence Unit report. Also consult our explainer about our impact so far.
How cost-effective are we vs the charities we recommend?
Donors often ask us how cost-effective we are compared to the charities we recommend. This is a difficult task, not least because it’s hard to be objective about yourself.
Nevertheless, we were independently assessed in 2023 by Innovations for Poverty Action‘s (IPA) Right-Fit Evidence Unit. This was at the request of Ambitious Impact (formerly Charity Entrepreneurship), the non-profit incubator we went through in 2019, who wanted to understand their former incubatees.
The IPA Right-Fit Evidence Unit estimated that donations to the Happier Lives Institute create ~320 WELLBYs per $1,000 donated. This is ~40 times more cost-effective than donations to GiveDirectly, a charity that provides cash transfers, which we use as a benchmark in our work.
In fact, this implies donating to HLI is far more impactful than any of the charities we recommend. We take this result with a large pinch of salt.
Need for funding
Donations to Happier Lives Institute will go towards our operational budgets, which cover:
- Staff salaries and freelancer costs (we’re a research organisation, so staff are the lion’s share of the budget)
- Expenses – website, services
- Outreach and fundraising
Also note:
- We take care to be responsible with any funding we receive. This means we keep our costs low. Our team is small. We don’t have a highly paid CEO. And we don’t pay for big marketing agencies.
- If we receive funding to fill our budget for the next 18 months, we will donate funds to our top recommended charities.
