Our Process

We designed this Impact Calculator to help answer the first question on a donor’s mind: where does my money go? While it’s easy to focus on overhead percentages, the real impact of a charity is reflected in what that charity can do with its budget. A donor who cares about reducing extreme poverty has hundreds of organizations to choose from – some of which are thousands of times more effective than others. Our Impact Calculator highlights the work of a few of the world’s most effective charities, allowing you to compare each organization – and the evidence supporting each intervention – side by side.

Effective Altruism Australia’s objective is to help others as much as possible for every dollar donated. To do this we support charities that are consistently ranked as highly cost effective by independent charity evaluators such as GiveWell, Giving What We Can, and The Life You Can Save. Because of their focus on transparency, commitment to evaluation and follow-up, and scaling of proven interventions, we have high confidence that these charities can reliably transform the lives of the worst off.

Determining a charity’s cost-effectiveness can be a complicated endeavor, and we could never hope to reflect our recommended charities’ full impact in one simple online tool. Instead, we’ve tried to create a starting point you can use in order to kickstart your investigation into impact-oriented philanthropy. We encourage you to use this as one resource among many in your charity assessments.

All prices listed here are in Australian Dollars. When converting from source prices listed in USD, we used the average exchange rate over 2016 as listed on OANDA.

For more information on our process, see our Partner Charities page or FAQ.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to everyone at The Life You Can Save, Random Hacks of Kindness, and all the volunteers who spent countless hours making this calculator function. This wouldn’t be possible without you; thank you!