Strong leadership. Even effective charities can falter under poor leadership. Before donating to a charity, you may want to look into its leaders. Is its leadership team experienced, mission-aligned, and diverse? Have there been any recent changes in leadership?
A healthy workplace culture. Mission-driven organisations, simply in virtue of having passionate, driven employees, are especially prone to staff burnout. Some organisations are able to manage the risk of burnout by, for example, providing flexible hours or mandatory time off. In other organisations though, the high-stress environment can lead to competition, toxic behavior, or even abuse. It's not easy to evaluate an organisation's culture from the outside, but some charity evaluators like Animal Charity Evaluators can provide some insight.
For donors to understand how effective a charity is, the charity must be transparent, willing to share information, provide evidence, and be clear about their funding needs. The more we can gather verified data on a charity, the more confident we can be that our donations will have an impact.
A common misconception is that the best charities are those with the lowest administrative or "overhead" costs. However, overheads rarely contribute significantly to the effectiveness of a charity.
Consider Charities E and F, described in the table below:. In the above example, Charity E spends very little on overhead costs, but Charity F still saves lives more cost effectively. Just as successful businesses "spend money to make money," successful charities invest some of their budget in hiring talented teams and building reliable infrastructure in order to achieve their goals. To identify effective charities, you shouldn't simply look for the charities that spend as little as possible; you should look for charities that achieve a lot relative to the amount they spend.
The focus on efficiency instead of effectiveness is so pervasive that it's commonly known as the " overhead myth " — and it's something you want to be careful to avoid. Check out our giving recommendations for the latest list of particularly cost-effective charities.
If you know which causes you'd like to support but you're having trouble selecting a charity, consider donating to a fund. Funds are easy for donors and highly effective. They help donors to pool their money together so that they can find outstanding giving opportunities that are evaluated by expert grantmakers and trusted charity evaluators. We recommend that you donate to the most effective charity you can find.
If you're confident you've found the right charity, you may want to send all of your donations there. There are compelling arguments to be made that donating a lot of money to a single effective charity is better than donating smaller amounts to multiple charities. However, some donors may be passionate about multiple high-impact causes or uncertain about which charities to support.
Such donors may prefer to diversify their giving by giving to multiple charities or supporting multiple causes. One benefit of supporting multiple causes is what Open Philanthropy calls " worldview diversification. Every donor has their own "worldview," or set of values that informs their decisions. For instance, one donor may believe that we only have moral obligations to humans living in the present, and another may believe that we have additional obligations to nonhuman animals or to future generations.
The first may choose to give to a charity working on global health, while the second may choose to give to an animal welfare organisation. If you're uncertain about your worldview, or if you believe that multiple worldviews are plausible, you may want to give to a global health charity, an animal welfare charity, and a charity working to safeguard the long-term future. There are several organisations dedicated to evaluating charities based on how effectively they use donations.
We particularly recommend using the advice of GiveWell, which evaluates charities working on global health and development, and Animal Charity Evaluators, which evaluates charities working on animal advocacy. At Giving What We Can, we partner with several evaluators and grantmaking organisations and have compiled their charity recommendations in one place.
GiveWell conducts detailed research on charities and recommends just a few that it finds to be exceptional. They evaluate charities based roughly on four criteria : evidence of effectiveness, cost effectiveness, room for more funding, and transparency. There are many high-impact giving opportunities in this area, because we can do the most good with our resources by helping people in the greatest need.
Accordingly, we make recommendations that can be grounded in a strong evidence base and thus whose impact can be somewhat easily verifiable for a low-information donor. Our top charities aren't the only great charities, and the case for them is far from airtight, but we believe they are the best bet for a low-information donor looking for a verifiably strong chance to do good.
When GiveWell started, we issued separate recommendations for charities focused on the developing world and charities focused on the U. Over time, however, we narrowed our focus. We believe that the top charity candidates we found for the developing world had considerably more robust evidence bases, considerably lower per-person costs, and overall a stronger case for accomplishing a lot of good per dollar more in this blog post. We believe the root issue here is that developing-world poverty is far more severe than developed-world poverty.
People in the developing world often lack basic, cheap things that can help them a great deal. For example, they may suffer from infectious diseases that could be treated or prevented relatively straightforwardly, if the funding were available. More: Your dollar goes further overseas. We believe there have been many efforts to find and address the root causes of poverty, and that they haven't generated strong conclusions or successful programs.
We also believe that direct aid, such as distributing malaria-preventing bed nets or providing pills to treat intestinal parasites, can empower individuals to make differences in their own communities. These individuals may be better positioned to understand and address many problems than we are.
We think it's appropriate for donors to focus on the problems they're best at helping with, recognizing that they aren't the only people who are working toward positive change. Any organisation in needs a strong social media and digital strategy. The digital age has given us the ability to reach new audiences and tap into new fundraising opportunities.
Social media is an excellent way for charities to engage with donors and raise awareness of their causes. From fundraising to spreading the word, social media is a powerful tool for any charity. Many of the most successful charities have a number of uses for social media in the pipeline at any given time.
Good quality content is an excellent way for any charity to educate potential donors and volunteers on the benefits that their charity can provide. One of the critical elements of a successful charity is having the trust of the general public.
Charities often need to be seen as above reproach in their practices, far more so than organisations in the for-profit sector. There has been much talk in recent years about where donation money goes within an organisation.
Transparency is one of the hallmarks of a successful charity. Having a clear and concise way of showing where their money is going can do wonders to improve trust among potential donors. This shows in clear and understandable terms what percentage of each pound donated goes to the main objective of the charity. Chances are, many of your family members are already giving to charity, so working together could help you to make even more of a positive impact.
We can help you family to set up a family CAF Charitable Trust to make coordinating your donations simple and sustainable.
If this has inspired you to make a donation to charity, we can help. Our charity search tool allows you to find charities working in the areas you're interested in and donate to them straight away. Modern Slavery Statement. Skip to main content Donate to a charity Register Log in. Search box. Menu Close Donate to a charity.
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