Comparing effective giving to other forms of charitable donations: Dos and Don’ts

On our homepage and throughout our website, we make a claim that is quite central to the project of effective giving: where you choose to donate greatly affects how much impact your money will have.

To make this point, we use language like: “You can often have 100x more impact by donating to the best charities” or, in a bit more detail, “Many of us can easily 100x our impact by giving to charities that achieve more per dollar spent.”

You may also notice similar claims on other effective giving websites. They may be phrased or framed slightly differently, but the core premise is the same.

Perhaps in part because there are so many different phrasings and framings of this idea, we’ve noticed some misconceptions surrounding what it really means, and we now believe language we’ve used in the past (such as “the best charities are often 100x better than others”) may, regrettably, have contributed to this.

The language we currently use (and this explanatory post) is an attempt to correct these misconceptions and stop them from happening in the future. Here, we’ll explain more about why we’ve shifted to a donor-facing perspective — “You can often have 100x more impact by donating to the best charities” or “the best charities can do 100x more with your dollar” — and we’ll also clarify what we do and don’t mean by statements like this. We hope this exploration also helps others (especially those who regularly talk or write about effective giving) discuss impact differences between charities in a clear and compelling way.

Why we changed our language

The language we used previously — “the best charities are 100x better than others” — is a good “broad brush” statement to encapsulate the reality that where you choose to donate has significant impact consequences. However, it runs the risk of being taken too literally while at the same time being quite vague.

We’ll start with vague: The “than others” part of the statement — the best charities are 100x better than others — leaves open the question: which others? Is it most charities? A handful? Something in between? There’s no information about which charities are 100x worse than the “best” charities.

This leads us into the potential for misinterpretation: We’ve seen this statement be interpreted to mean that effective charities are usually 100x better than most other charities, which is a stronger claim than we feel comfortable making. While it is the case that highly effective charities are significantly more impactful than many other giving options, how much more impactful (5x? 10x? 50x?) will vary, sometimes considerably, depending on which giving options you’re comparing! It’s also sometimes impossible to calculate — for example, if a charity doesn’t have cost-effectiveness data or reasoning behind its programs.

Then there’s marginal funding: Another reason we chose to shift the language is that effective giving focuses on how a donor can do the most good with their dollar. A truly exceptional charity might be 100x better than an alternative giving opportunity, on average, but if it is already up to its ears in funding and can’t absorb more, then donating to it won’t do 100x more good than the alternative.

And one more consideration: Last but not least, making a general claim about charities “being better than other charities” begs the question “better by whose light” / “what is “good” here?” Even within the general framework of effective giving, there are several different worldviews about which kind of donation opportunities are most impactful. By shifting to a donor-facing perspective, it is clearer that we’re evaluating this from the perspective of the donor’s worldview, rather than claiming we have access to a “one true worldview” by which these charities are better than others.

For all these reasons, we think it makes sense to talk about this from the donor perspective, rather than comparing charities in an (ambiguous) vacuum.

Breaking down the claim: You can do 100x more good per dollar by donating to the best charities.

What this means:

Most of the principles linked above could easily increase your impact by a factor of 10 (depending on your starting point) which means that, in some cases, following just two of them could multiply your impact by 100.

• We say in some cases because some of these principles overlap with others; counting each one as a literal 10x boost that could then be multiplied with others would be double-counting. In other words, following all five probably won’t 10⁵ your impact (but it will markedly increase it!)

• When interventions in global health were studied via the DCP2 and DCP3 projects, there were drastic differences in their cost-effectiveness. The best interventions were 30-50x more cost-effective than the median (an intervention in the middle of the lot) and 10,000 times more cost-effective than the worst. Note that interventions are different from charities; charities implement interventions but may have added costs to do so. (For this reason and others, we don’t mainly rely on the DCP2 data to make the case that donors could 100x their impact or more, but we do think it illustrates how extreme variations in cost-effectiveness can be. See our exploration of the DCP2 data and what it does/doesn’t mean.)

• Other data sets comparing interventions in other areas show similar patterns. For example, a 2020 data set comparing 150 education interventions attempting to improve learning outcomes in low and middle income countries found that the best interventions were, on average, 220x more cost-effective than the median, and as stated in the abstract: “The results show that some of the most cost-effective programs deliver the equivalent of three additional years of high-quality schooling (that is, schooling at quality comparable to the highest-performing education systems) for just $100 per child -- compared with zero years for other classes of interventions.”
• The difference in cost-effectiveness of interventions between cause areas (for example, cage-free initiatives vs. global health initiatives) may be greater than when comparing interventions in the same cause area, but this depends on your value system.
  • For example, if you value getting chickens out of battery cages, some evidence suggests that $1 has paid for the freedom (from cages, not factory farms) of between 9-120 chickens. This is likely at least a 100x impact boost compared to donating that dollar to your local library, where it couldn’t buy too much. (But if you don’t value the freedom of chickens from cages, then you might not see this as an impact boost.)

What this doesn’t mean:

We think our recommendations are incredibly high-impact, as shown by the impact-focused evaluations behind them, as well as meeting at least one (and often more) of these five principles. However, whether they provide 100x better opportunities than other charities will depend on these other charities you compare them to and on your particular worldview. The charity evaluation space is still very young, and we’re confident it has far from identified or evaluated all highly cost-effective donation opportunities there are to be found. This is part of the reason why we offer a range of promising supported programs on our donation platform in addition to our recommendations, and there may be many more charities out there that we’ve never even heard of that could outperform our recommendations by some worldviews.

Depending on how you define “typical,” this is likely true in some cases and for some donors, and we’ve used language similar to this in the past. For example, one could define a “typical” charity as a popular donation choice. If we go with that definition, then it’s notable that the most common place to donate is to a religious institution. Compare what $5 could buy donated to (say) one’s local church to what it could buy if donated to an organisation like the Against Malaria Foundation, where it could protect two people for two years from the devastating and painful disease of malaria, and a 100x impact boost would probably be an understatement by most worldviews, even considering the benefits it would bring to the church or the church’s community work.

That said, given the wide range of definitions for “typical,” we no longer use language like this. For example, a charity like Amnesty International or International Rescue Committee could very well be considered “typical” given its large donor base and high name recognition. Due to the types of programs these “typical” charities operate and the absence of an evaluation from an impact-focused evaluator, we feel confident that donors can reasonably expect to have much more impact by giving to our recommendations over these charities. Yet, part of the reason for this is that we just don’t know how impactful Amnesty International and co. are (and absent this evaluation, we don’t think donors can know either). Therefore, while we want to encourage donors to support programs where we have much higher confidence of impact, we don’t want to be misinterpreted as claiming that our recommendations are 100x better than charities like these. It could be much more than 100x, or it could be much less.

Concluding thoughts

Your impact can vary significantly depending on where you choose to donate. We’ve said this for years, and we’ll continue to say it.

In other words, shifting the language we use to make this point doesn’t change our charity recommendations or core premises.

Rather, it addresses a very real concern: if the language used to make this point leaves open the potential for misinterpretation and/or misrepresentation, we run the risk of encouraging unsupportable statements. If unsupportable statements are used to discuss this topic, confusion around this could overshadow the (quite supportable) and incredible opportunity we have – through our donation decisions – to drastically increase our impact and build the world we want to see.