Why effective giving?

Americans donated $600 billion to charity in 2024. This generosity is extraordinary, yet much of its potential impact is left on the table.


In recent years, researchers have begun rigorously studying charities' cost-effectiveness, much like investors evaluate which companies deliver the strongest returns. They ask questions such as: "How much does it cost for a charity's program to save a life?" or "Which interventions generate the greatest societal improvement?".

The results are striking. Charity evaluators find that some charities can be 100 times as effective as typical charities.

Giving Multiplier relies on evidence-based recommendations from the expert charity evaluators GiveWell, Animal Charity Evaluators, and Founders Pledge. Their independent researchers evaluate and identify the highest impact opportunities available to donors.

Importance

When you give to charity, the goal isn’t just to feel good. It’s also to make a real difference for others — that’s why effectiveness matters so much.

The impact of your donation often depends far more on where you give than how much you give. In many cases, $100 to a highly effective charity can accomplish more than $10,000 to a typical charity. This fact surprises most people and can be very empowering for everyday donors.

Just as the best athletes, artists, and businesses can drastically outperform others, so do charities. But because charities aren't usually compared in this way, the superstar charities are less visible. Yet they exist, and their outstanding impact has been identified by independent charity evaluators. Super-effective charities offer donors an exceptional opportunity to do far more good with the same resources.

Measurement

A common misconception is that cost-effectiveness is about minimizing overhead costs (administrative budget for staff, marketing, etc). Imagine applying this idea to businesses. Successful businesses understand that making money requires spending money. Successful businesses pay their staff competitive wages in order to hire and retain the most effective people. They invest in infrastructure and research. Likewise, well-run charities need good administrators, reliable infrastructure, and technical knowledge to maximize their impact. The right question is not “How can you spend as little money as possible?”, but instead, “How can you do the most good with the money that you spend?”

Measuring how much good an organization does is challenging, but it’s possible. A similar challenge arises in medicine, where decisions must be made based on the cost-effectiveness of different treatments. Which treatments save the most lives? Which treatments do the most to improve people’s quality of life? Is a risky surgery that costs $50,000 worth it if the money could be used to prevent 100 people from getting the same disease? One can ask the same questions about the work done by charities, and one can generate answers using methods originally developed by healthcare economists.

Choosing causes

Donating effectively requires identifying the most pressing problems. This means focusing on causes that are:

a) Big: Affecting many individuals

b) Solvable: Able to make progress

c) Neglected: Much more progress to be made

Using this framework, our super-effective charities address the following causes (and the charity evaluators we use):

i) Global health & poverty (GiveWell)

ii) Farm animal welfare (Animal Charity Evaluators)

iii) Catastrophic risk reduction (Founders Pledge)


Resources

Introduction to effective giving

Psychology of charitable giving

Giving Multiplier was co-founded by academic researchers at Harvard University who study the psychology of charitable giving. Here is a selection of media coverage about our work:


Articles

Podcasts

Don't want to donate right now?

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay in the loop (no spam).