For last year’s Giving Tuesday, I sketched out an approach to effective charitable giving. This focused on identifying important cause areas and finding high-impact charities within each one. Since there is little change in my thinking or in specific recommendations since then, please give that post a read if you are interested!
The approach highlighted the role of certain “meta-charities”, and so I want to expand briefly on why we think they can be great resources for donors. These meta-charities are non-profits whose mission is to objectively evaluate and recommend the best opportunities among (unaffiliated) charities working in a cause area. These organizations employ in-house research staffs and their evaluations typically use criteria such as expected impact, cost effectiveness, and ability to leverage new funding. Three of them in particular have been important to our philanthropy: GiveWell (global health and development), Animal Charity Evaluators (animal welfare), and Giving Green (climate).
One of the attractions of these organizations is that their work can help donors in a number of different ways depending on their needs and preferences. Let me list these, then I will go on to discuss our use of Giving Green as a specific example:
- Donors can just use their published research to inform their thinking. The three organizations I have mentioned are very transparent and share much of their work publicly with no obligation.
- If a subset of the recommendations overlap with causes you support, focus on these to find good charities to fund.
- If you gain confidence in the work of the meta-charity, just allocate donations broadly across their recommendations. In effect, you outsource your own research and decision-making to some full-time experts in the cause area.
- Some of these organizations offer in-house funds that take your donations and then re-allocate them as grants to their recommended charities. In this case, rather than you sending gifts to the individual charities, you send a single gift to the meta-charity’s managed fund: they use their discretion as to the timing and amount of the distributions to the recommended charities.
- If you value the organization’s work, a final option is to make a tax-deductible donation to them directly. To be clear, unlike in the choices discussed above (which focus on giving to the organization’s list of recommended charities), this provides unrestricted funds for the meta-charity itself. They can use it to fund operations, and perhaps foster their own growth and reach. In this way, you may help them influence the decisions of more donors, and thus the gift may have a larger, if indirect, influence on effective giving in the cause area.
Here’s how we used one of these organizations to help us. As background, my wife Dana and I were interested in the cause of combatting climate change, but had little confidence that we could have any impact. Frankly, we were not sure where to begin.
Giving Green attempts to address this difficulty through their research. This involves several steps, including analyzing possible strategies to address climate change, assessing the potential impact of directing philanthropic funding to each strategy, and then seeing if there are promising organizations that exist to pursue them (see a fuller discussion of their research process here). The goal of the work is to generate a list of recommended organizations best positioned to translate donations into impact. Roughly 3000 hours of research went into this year’s recommendations (see the list here). They include non-profits focused on several strategies, including expanding development of geothermal and advanced nuclear energy as well as pursuing reduction in emissions from heavy industry, transportation, and livestock.
More work happens each year to evaluate and revise the recommendations in response to new information and changes in the landscape (whether in terms of regulatory, economic or other factors). Giving Green is committed to transparency as a core value, so it provides a lot of information about its process and outputs, including an acknowledgement of past mistakes.
There is still more for us to learn about Giving Green and, of course, about the arena they work in. They are a fairly new entity, and the potential for organizational change represents a risk for those who look to them as a resource (note that Giving Green is a unit of a larger research and consulting non-profit called IDinsight). But, so far, we view them as a group of smart and dedicated people that we can leverage to have an impact. Because we think the task of helping donors find good ways to address climate change is so important in itself, we have chosen in this case to directly support Giving Green’s operations (option #5 above).
As always, let me know if you have comments or questions!
[Also posted on LinkedIn]