FAQs
General FAQs
The Happier Lives Institute is a nonprofit research organisation that identifies the most cost-effective ways to improve global wellbeing. We compare charities and interventions using robust measures of happiness and suffering, helping donors and decision-makers direct resources where they will improve lives the most.
We produce:
1) Charity recommendations: we do detailed analysis to find the most cost-effective, evidence-based charities that transform the lives & wellbeing of people in need.
2) Research consultancy services: tailored analysis for maximum impact. We work with donors, foundations, and policymakers to help them understand better how they can have more impact with their money and allocate resources with confidence.
3) Publications & Resources: we write about charities, cause areas, and wellbeing methodology. Recently, we contributed to the World Happiness Report.
It was founded by Dr. Michael Plant, HLI’s Director, in 2019. The idea came from Michael’s philosophy PhD, when he realised there should be evidence-based research into the best ways to improve happiness globally. For more, see Why we started.
HLI is the first and only organisation that searches for the most cost-effective, evidence-based charities at improving wellbeing. We conduct very deep research into the charities, and only recommend the best one we’ve found so far. We quantify impact in terms of Wellbeing Adjusted Life-Years aka WELLBYs (see that FAQ below). So, if your aim in donating is to help people live happier lives, and you want to give with confidence, we’re here to empower you.
HLI's registered office in Bristol, England, where our Director and COO both live, but our team mostly work remotely, and currently spread across the UK, the US, and Sweden. We have charitable status in the UK and the US.
A WELLBY, or Wellbeing-adjusted Life Year, is a method to measure and value improvements in wellbeing, defined as a one-point change in life satisfaction (on a 0 to 10 scale) for one person for one year. So if you went from 6/10 to 7/10 for 2 years, that would be 2 WELLBYs. For more, see What is a WELLBY?
Yes. They have been approved for policy evaluation and design by both the UK and New Zealand Treasuries already, and 37 countries worldwide are collecting life satisfaction data now.
The LSE value for money group, Pro Bono Economics, and State of Life quantify impact in WELLBYs and they have argued for in academia.
For more, see our What is WELLBY page.
Very roughly, you could have 100 to 1000 times more impact for your money.
We don’t know of any research that really worked out how cost-effective the ‘average charity’ is; there are millions of charities globally, so this would be a big task! However, we did the first-ever global comparison of charities by how much happiness they produce per dollar, published in the World Happiness Report (and now a living review).
We found the most cost-effective charity in our sample was about ~1000 times better than the least cost-effective one (we didn’t find any charities with zero or negative impact). Our top 5 charities are 131 times more impactful than the average of the UK charities we assessed.
See our Why some charities are 1000 times more impactful page for more information on this.
LMIC is an abbreviation for low- and middle-income countries.
You can see our current list of recommended charities on the Donate page.
We look for the most cost-effective charities in the world, and the best ones we’ve found so far are all based in LMICs, largely because money spent tends to go further there and needs are greater.
We will recommend charities in HICs (high-income countries) if/when we find one that looks as impactful as our current recommendations. For a global view, see our Charity Comparisons page.
We set out to find and recommend the charities that have the biggest impact, so we showcase the best charities, not just great or good ones. We don’t expect to ever recommend lots of charities.
If/when we find charities that are more cost-effective than our current recommendations, we expect to replace those recommendations.
Note that Top Charities (charities that have high cost-effectiveness and an in-depth evaluation we are confident about) is only one type of recommendation.
We also have Promising Charities (charities that have high cost-effectiveness but for which the analysis is more uncertain) and Honourable Mentions (special cases that we think are likely cost-effective, but we don’t have sufficient material to make a recommendation like our promising or top recommendation).
For more detail on our recommendation categories, see our understanding our charity comparisons page.
We are constantly looking for even better charities. Make sure to check out our Research Agenda for details.
To assess charities, we rely on a combination of existing academic research into the interventions (e.g. randomised controlled trials of psychotherapy in LMICs) and data from the charities themselves. As such, we mostly do secondary research, that is, we rely on data collected by others.
We also do novel primary research into philosophical and methodological issues; see Our Publications.
We hope to do more primary data collection in the future.
No.
We don’t take any money from charities for recommending them because this would remove our impartiality.
We exist because we want the world to be a happier place and, therefore, we think there should be a free, impartial source of information about which charities do the most for people’s happiness and wellbeing.
To understand how we do fund ourselves, check out the ‘How does HLI support itself’ question below this!
Thanks to the generosity of people like you!
We can only do our research and outreach because donors support us and make our work possible.
Donors can financially support us in two ways:
- Directly: You can give to HLI directly and support our research and outreach to spread the message of effective giving and wellbeing science.
- ‘Tipping’: When you donate to one of our recommended charities, you can choose to ‘tip’ us and give us a percentage of your donation so that we can continue our work. This is purely at the discretion of the donor! If you don’t want to, you don’t have to.
Our past records indicate that HLI has a leverage effect: each $1 donated to Happier Lives Institute raises a further $2-5 for our recommended charities, as well as funding our pioneering research.
You can see an external review of HLI by IPA’s Right-Fit Evidence Unit here. Their projection estimates that funding us produces ~320 WELLBYs per $1,000 donated.
HLI is currently fundraising to grow and scale our impact. However, we will/would redirect donors to give to the recommended charities instead if we found the balance was wrong.
We want donors to support us and our recommended charities.
You can read more about our impact in our Understanding Our Impact page.
Happier Lives Institute has authored a chapter in the 2025 World Happiness Report: our chapter carries out the first-ever global comparison of how much happiness charities create per dollar.
HLI’s Director, Dr Michael Plant, is also a Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre, University of Oxford, which publishes the World Happiness Report.
There are so many ways you help the world to be a happier place!
- Donate to one of our recommended charities.
- Donate to fund our research and outreach.
- Follow Happier Lives Institute on social media and help spread the word.
- Sign up for our newsletter and stay up to date with new insights on Happiness Science and how to give effectively.
- Read our research – we would love your feedback.
- Join a local Action for Happiness group.
- Consider changing your career: see the School for Moral Ambition or Probably Good for resources.
‘Wellbeing’ refers to living a life that is good for you, and is a longstanding technical term in philosophy, economics, and psychology. There are several views of what ultimately makes life go well for someone. See our article on the Philosophy of Wellbeing.
‘Wellness’ is a relatively new word that seems to be associated with lifestyle and self-care, particularly things like yoga and meditation.
In HLI, we are ultimately interested in wellbeing: there is more to living a good life than wellness.
Whilst most of our research is done remotely, we have visited both of our top recommended charities working on mental health in sub-Saharan Africa (Strong Minds and Friendship Bench), in Uganda and Zimbabwe. You can find these site visit reports in Our Publications.
Research FAQs
Here are some of the most common questions we get asked about our research.
Still have a question at the end of this? Check out our ‘Our Philosophy’ page. If you still can’t find what you want feel free to drop us an email at hello@happierlivesinstitute.org and we will see if we can help!
Actually, many groups and academics are already using subjective wellbeing measures!
37 governments worldwide now gather life satisfaction data from their citizens. Notably, the UK and New Zealand treasuries have officially adopted WELLBYs for policy design and evaluation.
And although HLI was the first to evaluate charities in terms of wellbeing impact, we’re not alone. Organisations like State of Life and Pro Bono Economics also help charities, policymakers, and for-profit organisations create WELLBY-based evaluations.
Wellbeing research has also exploded in academia in recent years. Between 2003 and 2022 the number of publications with titles or abstracts containing “happiness”, “life satisfaction,” “satisfaction with life”, or “subjective well(-)being” has grown by a factor of ten.
In particular, we would point to work by Christian Krekel, Richard Layard, and colleagues at the London School of Economics who have evaluated a wide range of government policies as well as charities (e.g., Frijters & Krekel, 2021; Frijters et al., 2024; Frayman et al., 2024).
Wellbeing metrics are no longer some fringe idea – they’re rapidly catching up to where they should have been all along.
Saving lives is good, but how do we compare it to improving lives? That depends on how bad we think death is.
Philosophers disagree. The Epicurean view says death isn’t bad for the person who dies, it is only bad only for those left behind and any suffering before death. The deprivationist view adds that death is bad because it prevents future happiness.
This gets trickier with the neutral point: at what level of wellbeing does life become not worth living? This is important because many would argue that extending a life that has negative or neutral wellbeing is not a gain. For instance, would it be a good thing to save someone who will live under constant torture?
At HLI, we don’t take a stance on the best philosophical view or where the neutral point is – we don’t think there are good answers to these questions.
Our evaluations instead typically focus on improving quality of life rather than quantity.
Want to dig deeper? Check out our Elephant in the Bednet report which explores this topic in much more depth.
Note that this problem is not specific to the wellbeing approach. Any evaluator has to answer these questions, either implicitly or explicitly. Your healthcare system has to make decisions about comparing quantity and quality of life. Other charity evaluators, like GiveWell, answer this question by using subjective moral weights of how morally equivalent ‘saving an under 5 years old’s life’ is to ‘doubling the income of someone’ (and other factors).
For now, we focus on human wellbeing. Work on animal and environmental charities is complex and currently out of our scope.
For environmental charities, we would have to build a model of how different environmental outputs (CO2, biodiversity, etc.) affect human and animal wellbeing. However, it is extremely difficult to compare the wellbeing of animals to humans.
If you are interested in supporting animal charities or environmental charities we recommend checking out:
QALYs (Quality-Adjusted Life Years) and DALYs (Disability-Adjusted Life Years) are standard health metrics in global development.
1 QALY is the equivalent of 1 year in perfect health. So if an intervention extends someone’s life by 5 years but leaves them with a condition that reduces their quality of life to 0.5 (on a scale of 0-1), that intervention has created 5*0.5 = 2.5 QALYs.
A DALY works in reverse: it measures years of healthy life lost due to disease or disability.
We see two major problems with these measures:
1. QALYs and DALYs only value physical health.
They don’t value improvements in income, social relationships, stress, or leisure time.
All of us would say our health is important for a good life, but anyone would be hard-pressed to say only health is important for a good life.
2. QALYs and DALYs rely on guesses – not lived experience.
QALYs and DALYs involve asking healthy people to predict how bad disabilities or illnesses would be. But when we compare the guesses used to calculate QALYs to real-life wellbeing data from people living with these conditions, they’re wildly different. In particular:
- People overestimate how bad physical disabilities will be and
- massively underestimate the impact of mental health conditions.
For example, in the UK people are willing to give up about 15% of their remaining life expectancy to avoid both “some problems walking about” (aka a limp), and “moderate anxiety or depression”. However, when we ask people actually living with these conditions, those with depression experience a 10x bigger drop in their wellbeing than those who develop a limp.
This is why we prefer WELLBYs, which measure how people with these conditions actually feel. We wouldn’t trust a restaurant review from someone who never ate there, so why trust quality-of-life ratings from people who never lived with those conditions?
Some argue the best way to help people is simple: give them money and let them decide what’s best for them. We agree cash transfers can be a powerful tool – but are they always the best way to improve wellbeing? We think not necessarily. Here’s why:
1. People are not always rational maximisers of their wellbeing
People might not always purchase the best things for their wellbeing. This can be because of a lack of information or because we are bad at guessing how things will affect our wellbeing.
For example, Michael, our Founder and Director, commonly recounts a time when he was in sub-Saharan Africa doing a site visit to one of our top charities, StrongMinds, when he met a woman who said:
“I was initially disappointed that StrongMinds wasn’t giving me cash. But after therapy, I am very glad I got therapy instead of money – I would never have guessed how much it would change my life.”
To be clear, people don’t waste cash. Studies show time and time again that they spend it well… just not always optimally. That’s why we like GiveDirectly, but we have also evaluate organisations we think outperform them.
2. What about autonomy?
The advantage of the WELLBY approach is that, through people’s self-reports, we get evidence on what actually makes a difference to their lives as they live them – not just what they (or evaluators) expect would matter.
The second perspective is that we should give people cash even if we have good evidence that something else would be more cost-effective. Those in this camp tend to prioritise autonomy. As a philosophical position, we think autonomy is a contributor to happiness, but it’s people’s happiness that ultimately matters: an autonomy-maximising option may not be the best overall for someone. As it happens, our recommended charities are typically great for autonomy too: mental health conditions are debilitating, for instance, and addressing them empowers people.
3. Some things aren’t for sale
Sometimes the thing that would improve their life just isn’t available to buy.
For example, giving people cash won’t enable them to coordinate the removal of lead in products like Pure Earth does. Charities like StrongMinds and Friendship Bench deliver psychotherapy in countries where you cannot typically go out and buy psychotherapy for yourself.
In conclusion, while cash is great, we have already found many alternatives that provide more wellbeing for less.
First, it is important to note that a WELLBY is the integration of the wellbeing impact over time (i.e., wellbeing per years). WELLBYs are more than capable of capturing long-term benefits to individuals and we have already used them for this purpose.
This is about modelling the right thing, not about the WELLBY itself.
So, even for interventions that might seem short-term (e.g., psychotherapy and cash transfers), we have included long-term effects.
We have also modelled interventions with very long-term effects. For example, see our reports on parenting programs that impact children well into adulthood or lead exposure reduction programmes that can alter childhood development and change people’s entire life paths.
Note that we don’t discount future WELLBYs. We value WELLBYs created in the future equally to present ones. If charities can show long-term benefits, we count them. We might reconsider this, if appropriate, but until now this is how we have operated.
Some argue cost-effectiveness metrics focus too much on individuals rather than systemic transformation. Shouldn’t we be focusing on policy reforms, infrastructure, and changing the system that allowed us to get here in the first place rather than just treating the symptoms of these causes?
1. We do evaluate systemic changes!
Most simply, we already have evaluated systemic changes. For instance, we ran an evaluation of Pure Earth this year, an advocacy charity aimed at changing government policies on lead pollution. We’ve also evaluated the benefits of immigration reform.
2. While we are open to systemic change, it is hard to evaluate
We prioritise issues which we think are:
Important – it could massively improve wellbeing
Tractable – it seems possible to solve and
Neglected – there are not many resources already dedicated to this issue
While systemic changes are often important, it is their tractability and neglectedness which means they often rank lower on our priority list. In other words, systemic changes often are really hard, and already have a lot of money going into them.
Note that our evaluations of advocacy programmes will inherently carry more speculation due to the difficulties in calculating the counterfactual (i.e., it is hard to say when a policy would have otherwise passed), probability of success (how likely is this advocacy action going to succeed), and causal attribution (how much has this advocacy action really contributed to the success).
3. Individual interventions can drive grassroots systemic change.
We would challenge the separation between individual-level interventions and systemic change. They are often interwoven.
Empowering individuals can create grassroots momentum. Research shows that alleviating poverty and mental health struggles frees cognitive bandwidth, enabling people to push for broader reforms. For example, charities like StrongMinds and Friendship Bench work with the health ministries of their respective countries to improve access to mental health.
The largest charities in the world like Oxfam and Save the Children are often what we would call MANGOs – Multi-Armed NGOs. These are charities running numerous programs across various aid sectors.
We have four core challenges that we think make MANGOs unlikely to be the most cost-effective donation choice:
- Complexity and Opacity – MANGOs run many interventions, but information on their costs and impact is scarce.
- The Dilution Effect – Mixing effective and ineffective programs lowers average impact of donations
- Fungibility – Restricting donations to individual programmes is often merely illusionary due to the unrestricted funds large charities can reallocate.
- Mindset – Running many interventions suggests a lack of a prioritisation mindset. If one intervention is more effective than another, why would an organisation focused on doing the most good continue to operate both?
See our blog “Why household name NGOs are unlikely to offer the best value for money” for more detail.
Subjective wellbeing (SWB) is an umbrella term for self-reported ratings of thoughts and feelings about life which fall into three main categories: cognitive, hedonic, and eudaimonic. These categories define wellbeing as slightly different things, although in practice they are all strongly correlated. For more detail, see our page on the philosophy of wellbeing and the OECD’s guidelines on measuring wellbeing.
Cognitive (Life Satisfaction)
Cognitive measures are measures of peoples view of their lives overall aka their life satisfaction. Life satisfaction is usually found by asking
“Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?” (0-10 scale)
This is the most common measure used because it is much easier to collect data on life evaluations than on experiences. When we talk about subjective wellbeing this is typically what we mean, and the measure we use in evaluations.
However, it isn’t perfect and you can learn more in our paper critiquing life satisfaction measures. Or watch our Founder and Director Dr. Michael Plant presenting his critiques at the Wellbeing Research Centre.
Hedonic (Affect)
Hedonic measures are the second most common measure and are often used to validate evidence of improvements in life satisfaction. They capture the positivity of people’s experiences as opposed to evaluations of them, after the event, like life satisfaction. Because measures of affect are less stable (i.e., can vary day to day) than life satisfaction, they require more regular sampling which is more expensive.
The most common way to collect data on this is to ask:
“Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?” (0-10 scale)
Eudaimonic (Virtue and Meaning)
Eudaimonia questions aim to capture whether people have meaning and purpose in their lives.
The most common question to do this is:
“Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?” (0-10 scale)
Eudaimonia is the least used wellbeing metric, partly because it seems unclear if these measures are just a part of subjective wellbeing, rather than what subjective wellbeing itself is.
GiveWell is a well-known charity evaluator. Before diving into our differences we want to highlight our respect for the work GiveWell does. We think we share many more similarities with our friends at GiveWell than differences and hope that we can continue to push each other in a positive direction for the benefit of the world.
That said we vary from GiveWell in a couple of ways:
1. We recommend different types of charities
The simplest answer is that we each consider and recommend different types of charities:
- HLI recommends the best charities for improving quality of life, and
- GiveWell recommends the best charities for increasing quantity of life
In other words we look to make people happier, whereas GiveWell is more focussed on saving lives.
2. We use different units
HLI evaluates charities in terms of WELLBYs per dollar. WELLBYs quantify changes in people’s satisfaction with their life. To read more about this visit our ‘What is a WELLBY?’ page.
In contrast, GiveWell has its own, unique subjective ‘moral weights’ framework where they decide how morally equivalent different inputs such as ‘saving an under 5 years old’s life’, ‘doubling the income of someone’, and others are to each other.
3. How to trade off quality and quantity of life.
As we have laid out in a previous FAQ, and in detail in our report The Elephant in the Bednet, comparing quality and quantity of life is complex and involves a spectrum of reasonable opinions. We do not take a particular stance on them.
In contrast, via their moral weight system, GiveWell has decided to put a very high weight on saving lives.
We also realised that donors aren’t particularly interested in thinking about this question; they either want to support quality life-improving or life-extending charities (and, sometimes, a split of both). As GiveWell already caters to donors who want to save lives and take a stronger view than we do, we focus on improving quality of life.