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How we find the best charities

What makes a charity effective?

We consider research from independent charity evaluators and academia to identify the very best projects to support. We further review whether the work of each highly recommended charity is in line with our purpose, and ensure our partnership would be beneficial within the landscape of Australian charitable giving.

We currently primarily leverage the work of GiveWell for our global health recommendations. They have been operating aiming to find the charities that can save or improve lives the most per dollar for over a decade, backed by 70,000+ hours of research each year. GiveWell publish transparent reports on their process and evaluations, and regularly review the cost-effectiveness of past recommendations they’ve made.

Giving Green is our key evaluation partner for climate change recommendations for our Environment Fund. They assess potential recommendations  for scale, feasibility and funding need, while aiming to make the biggest possible difference to climate outcomes. Giving Green have influenced over $35m USD in donations to effective climate solutions

We also use evaluations from Giving What We Can and The Life You Can Save to support additional recommendations and body of evidence.

In order to identify the most highly effective charities, we use the following four criteria:

Estimated intervention effectiveness

The effectiveness of an intervention depends on the certainty with which it can be linked to positive outcomes. To ensure that all charities we support are reliably creating positive social outcomes, we focus on those that have been studied rigorously and have an experimentally demonstrated track record.

Estimated impact per dollar

Providing simple interventions, such as mosquito nets or vitamin A pills, can significantly improve lives at a low cost. Additionally, since these communities have less money, even modest donations can make a substantial difference, allowing individuals to meet their basic needs. This generally leads us to partner with charities working outside of Australia. Even among organisations working in developing countries however, there is a vast difference between the most cost-effective and the least.

Transparency

Charities must provide access to their data and internal operations in order to be thoroughly evaluated on their effectiveness. To provide confidence in our evaluations, we only work with those charities that are willing to maintain high levels of transparency and undergo thorough vetting of their programs.

Room for more funding

Even an extremely effective charity may not be a good candidate for additional donations, depending on its capacity for growth. We ask the question: Is a charity able to absorb more donations and scale up its operations, or is it near its capacity limit, meaning additional donations wouldn’t help much in the short term?

While we apply these criteria specifically to improving the lives of humans in the near-term (by reducing poverty, improving global health and economic development), the broader effective altruism movement is concerned with lived experiences of all living creatures (including animals) both now and into the far future.

For a broader list of effective giving opportunities beyond global health and poverty alleviation, we highly recommend Giving What We Can’s list of the best charities and donation recommendations across multiple causes and guide on how to evaluate charities across different causes.

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