Counting (some of) our impact so far
The narrowest, most countable part of our impact: the donations we know we influenced towards better charities, from 2022 to 2025, and the extra wellbeing they created.
Context
What this counts
At HLI, we research the best ways globally to improve human happiness. A primary audience for this is donors who are looking to do the most good with their donations.
Here we count where we know we have influenced donors to give to different charities, and the additional impact this has had. It leaves out the wider impacts of our work, such as influencing researchers or policymakers, and any donations we can't track.
We count what we can to keep ourselves accountable and transparent. This assumes you know what a WELLBY is; if not, see our explainer page.
Where we are
HLI started in 2019. We spent our first years in an 'R&D' phase, developing the wellbeing methodology and assessing the cost-effectiveness of charities, and started making recommendations in 2022.
In 2025, we published the first global comparison of charities in the World Happiness Report. We are now working to scale up the money we influence, and expect it to go up sharply, and our own cost-effectiveness with it.
How we calculated our impact
Our impact is the difference between the world as it is today and what it would have been had HLI not existed. That world without HLI is the 'counterfactual', so we call this our counterfactual impact.
Our most countable counterfactual impact comes from improving where donors who were already going to give effectively send their money, by identifying better charities than those available before our work. The method is the same as in our 2025 Annual Report (p. 22).
Our simplifying assumption is that, without HLI, donors would have given to GiveDirectly, which provides cash transfers. For each charity we have influenced funding towards, we take the difference in WELLBYs per dollar between that charity and GiveDirectly, and multiply it by the money moved.
Why GiveDirectly, and not deworming?
Before our work, the best life-improving charities available were GiveDirectly and deworming charities. Our 2022 deworming report found no clear wellbeing effects of deworming, so we use GiveDirectly alone as our baseline: a conservative choice that works against us.
What about donors new to effective giving?
We also bring in some donors new to effective giving, by offering options that match their values (improving lives rather than saving them) or covering cause areas that weren't really covered (mental health). But we conservatively assume they would all have given effectively anyway.
The most common case
A donation to StrongMinds rather than GiveDirectly, in WELLBYs per $1,000
32.85 WELLBYs per $1,000: the uplift we count
If we assumed these donors would otherwise have given nothing, we would count all 40.37, only about 25% more. So the conservative assumption doesn't change much, which fits the accepted view that it really matters to find and support the best charities.
Money influenced
The money we are confident we influenced towards high-impact charities. It's an imperfect exercise, limited by what we can count, and comes through three routes.
Processed by HLI
Direct donations sent to us, which we then send to the charities.
Reported by charities
Money charities received where the donors cited HLI's work as influential.
Via effective giving organisations
Organisations that use our recommendations and either allocate their own funds to them, or advise others who do.
Total countable donations, 2022 to 2025
The three routes are mutually exclusive, so nothing is counted twice, but they are not exhaustive. If donors give based on our recommendations, but not through us or a partner, and don't report it, we don't know about it and have to count it as zero.
Our cost-effectiveness
Donors often ask how we compare with the charities we recommend. It's hard to be objective about yourself, so we count it from the money our research has actually moved.
WELLBYs per $1,000 spent on HLI
252,451 additional WELLBYs on total costs of $2.71m; 93.2 to be precise. Costs run from 2019 to 2025; money moved from 2022, when we started making recommendations, to the end of 2025.
To avert a year of depression
1.3 WELLBYs equal not having depression for a year. Each $14 given to HLI's budget has, on average, prevented the equivalent of a year's depression for one person.
To 'save a life from suffering'
If we think of 60 years of depression as a lifetime of suffering.
Cash transfers
If you were wondering in 2019 whether to give to GiveDirectly or to HLI, giving to HLI would have had 12.3 times the impact. We think this shows the value of research to set priorities, and of communicating it.
None of these charities would have WELLBY estimates without HLI's work.
WELLBYs per $1,000 in 2025 alone
69,487 WELLBYs at a cost of $525,201, or $9.83 to avert a year of depression. That's just over 3 times our Top Charity StrongMinds, which creates 40 WELLBYs per $1,000 donated.
Why we take this with a pinch of salt
Our work is less scalable than the charities we recommend. We think we're the best buy per dollar (otherwise we'd be doing something else), but only up to a point. And these figures only count the donations we can trace, so they are a lower bound.
An earlier, independent estimate (2023)
Before we could count the donations we actually influenced, Innovations for Poverty Action's Right-Fit Evidence Unit assessed us in 2023, at the request of Ambitious Impact (formerly Charity Entrepreneurship), the incubator we went through in 2019. It projected ~320 WELLBYs per $1,000 donated, about 40 times GiveDirectly's cash transfers. The figures above are what we have measured since. Its main assumptions were:
- Our research has identified charities several times more cost-effective than cash transfers.
- Our outreach would lead donors to switch from charities as good as cash transfers to our Top Charities.
- We were on track to move $10m a year by 2029.
What does this miss?
Paradigm-shifting effects
Our impact comes through two paths. The first is finding and moving philanthropic resources towards the most cost-effective ways to improve wellbeing: that's what this page counts.
The second is a paradigm shift among decision-makers in philanthropy, policymaking and academia, so that they take happiness seriously and use wellbeing data to set their priorities, even if they aren't trying to maximise the impartial good. That's harder to quantify: we track indicators like engagement with our work, but don't count it here.
The two are connected. As the first team to attempt wellbeing cost-effectiveness, our methods and findings are a proof of concept that others can adopt.
Missed donations
We only launched direct giving through our website at the end of 2024, so much of our impact has gone through partner organisations, and through donors who use our research and recommendations but give directly to the charities.
We believe we have identified most of the donations made through partners, but we are sure we have missed some. So we treat the money influenced as a lower bound.
Redirected donations
It's hard to count our impact as a challenger in charity evaluation. Our replication of GiveWell's deworming analysis won their 'Change Our Mind' competition, and led them to redirect between $2 and $8 million away from deworming.
More recently, a philosophical paper on moral uncertainty by our Director, Dr Michael Plant, is being used in Rethink Priorities' donation allocation tool.
Working out where that money went instead, and the wellbeing it created, is a long piece of work, so neither is counted here.
Annual reviews
What we did each year, and what it achieved.
Be part of the next step
Even while research rather than fundraising was our main focus, HLI and our donors have helped generate wellbeing equivalent to 194,000 years of depression avoided. As we move into our 2025 to 2030 scale phase, we expect the money moved and the wellbeing created to grow significantly. The methods are in place; the next step is to bring them to scale.