Effective Giving Ireland

[originally a linked-in post]

So, Effective Giving Ireland is a project I've been working on with a few amazing people, all volunteers, and we're going to have a small kick-off session this month.

It's a charity with a difference. We don't "do" anything ourselves, but we help people who want to donate to charity to understand how to make their donations as impactful as possible. If you donate, we pass 100% of your donation to whichever of our recommended "effective" charities you choose to support.

There is a world of science and statistics behind the approach, and you can read about it on our website www.effectivegiving.ie and go down an infinite rabbit hole if you choose. But the gist of the idea is this:

• There are highly respected societies called "Charity Evaluators" who evaluate charities and their initiatives the same way companies evaluate business proposals for profitability, or engineers evaluate car-engines for fuel-efficiency (except VW, obviously).
• They do statistical analyses, they use double-blind studies, they follow up results for years after the interventions end to assess long-term impacts. Their reports are published in peer-reviewed journals (anyone can read them).
• They assess quantitatively how effective a given intervention was - and very importantly, they compare very different interventions as meaningfully as possible.
• They do not judge based on which celebrity backed the charity, or on how emotional the images were, or how inspiring the idea was. They just look at cold, hard data. "Based on everything we know, if I were to donate €1000 to this charity, how much good would it do? How many lives might I save? How many girls might I enable to attend school? And so on."
• There are many well-meaning charities, run by wonderful, honest, dedicated people, which are just not very effective. They work hard, they truly believe in what they do, but the data shows that it doesn't change people's lives.
• Whereas a small percentage of charities and initiatives are in the opposite situation. They seem to deliver a huge value for every euro they get. When they run a project in a village, then ten years later that village is prosperous and healthy while an otherwise identical village without their intervention is not. And this happens time and time again. Whenever this charity decides to intervene, there is a dramatic and sustainable counterfactual impact on the quality of life. Their work is often not glamorous or sexy, but it changes lives.
• These charities can be literally 100 times better than less effective charities.

Our mission is to make people aware that this knowledge and research exists, and to help people find the most effective charities that work in whatever field they want to support.It's no coincidence that I'm an engineer - you could almost think of this as describing how an engineer would do charity. We'd remove the beauty and the emotion, and just focus on the numbers. So sad ... unless you think that helping as many people as possible is beautiful ...