Giving What We Can review

My key questions

What does Giving What We Can do?

Giving What We Can is a community of effective givers. We inspire people to donate significantly and as effectively as possible.

Traditionally they also did research but that’s spinning down now:

Within global health and development, we will move to simply recommending GiveWell’s top charities, rather than curating an independent but overlapping list of recommended charities based in large part on their research (as we do now).

Some Organisational Changes at the Centre for Effective Altruism

GWWC produced the Pledge, and tracked subscribees to it, and stuff like MyGiving, which helps encourage people (provides accountability) but also helps GWWC self-evaluate their own impact and the effectiveness of the Pledge.

GWWC run the GWWC Trust, which simplifies donating for many people and provides tax-deductibility to UK donors for some non-UK organisations. The latter is the only reason I use it, so that I can donate to GiveDirectly and DtWI. It’s not clear to me how common that is as a reason for using the Trust or how much money is redirected from tax payments in this way, although we know that >$1m goes through the trust. (Unanswered question: how much social good does it do to redirect £x from tax payments to charity? Tax money on average probably does more good than my spending money (or my unspent money!), but how much? At the same time, some would certainly argue that there are government projects whose budget would be better served even being redirected to, say, the bottom of the sea.)

I’ve always been a bit disappointed that the Trust doesn’t integrate with MyGiving in some labour-saving way. But that’s probably neither here nor there.

“Our Impact”

GWWC have a page where they basically calculate the money redirected to effective charity by them, and divide it by their costs. I think this is an interesting thing to do, but it’s basically a red herring, especially as they acknowledge an expectation that their costs will increase as they attempt to grow more in the future. We don’t expect an additional dollar will earn $104 for effective charities. In fact, that page isn’t a great place to find out what an additional dollar will do at all.

There’s a link from there to the most recent fundraising report which seems like a better place to go, although it hasn’t been updated since the CEA merger. (Curiously, it looks like the “Quick Stats” are updated: they say 1929 members, while the text says “over 1300”, and the PDF says 1386).

Given it’s about eight months since this report, my guess is I should just talk to GWWC directly about what’s happened since then. But in the meantime, let’s find out what their plans were.

The report discusses:

Let’s examine what each will do with more money:

Community building

Central office organises a number of events each year: we recently passed half a billion dollars pledged and plan to host a celebratory party in early 2016 to remind members of the good they are doing and the extent to which the community is growing.

This is probably good but not inspiring, and feels a tiny bit indulgent. It’s fine to have indulgences, but I’m not excited about funding them.

We also reach out to new members, offering them a Skype conversation with a member of staff: over the past year we have spoken to almost 200 members in this way.

These do sound useful – getting people talking leads to good things, and GiveWell’s recently had the same idea. It also has an obvious cost, in staff time.

The trust

To that end, the Giving What We Can Trust was launched at the beginning of 2014 to facilitate tax-efficient donations to top charities.

I hadn’t realised it was specifically for tax efficiency. In light of that it seems a little bit odd that they don’t try to measure the amount of money moved directly from tax to charity by these means. Although admittedly that’s not super straightforward. If I couldn’t give tax-efficiently to those US charities, I might just have given more to AMF instead. That might even be a win? It certainly would have made my bookkeeping easier!

Anyway, there’s clearly some value here, even if it isn’t straightforwardly the value of all tax that was deducted by virtue of giving via the Trust.

They’re thinking of setting up a US trust as well. This seems also like a good thing, although I don’t know a bunch about US taxes.

Research

Per the above this doesn’t seem like it’s going to continue in its current form. Which I think is probably a net win. In the future, it could be nice to have more than one GiveWell, to form a more independent consensus and lessen the chances of systematic error. But I’d guess (fairly baselessly) that we’re not at the stage where that’s the most efficient use of resources.

It’s interesting to see how the fundraising prospectus for Winter 2015 doesn’t appear to have anticipated that shift, and seems very much about how totally important their research is. I think GWWC perhaps lacks the well-developed instinct that (say) GiveWell has for critically evaluating the usefulness (or otherwise) of its own programs. Or perhaps it does have that instinct, but it’s slightly less open / public about it. They do, to their credit, mention that GiveWell is also in the space and “increasingly professionalized”, but I’d like to have seen more said about the perceived value added there. Perhaps it’s moot now.

Anyway, the research team at GWWC is going to continue to exist (after some restructuring / reshuffling) and they’re proceeding as follows:

Our main focus within charitable research will be experimenting with a new project: boutique philanthropic advice to major donors. We’ve found that there is notable demand for evidence-based charity research from major donors who, for a variety of reasons, do not want simply to support GiveWell’s top charities or to work with Open Philanthropy. (Often, the donor is interested in a particular cause area, such as disaster preparedness, that is different from the work of GiveWell’s top charities.)

On the face of it there’s certainly potential for serious impact here. It seems a valuable thing to be doing. I have a mild concern that we’re compromising on cause-neutrality here, but if we can’t turn people cause-neutral, then ensuring their cause-partial actions are based on sound evidence and thoughtful analysis is probably still a win. If it comes to finding the most effective method of treating some exceptionally rare disease or solving some basically unburdensome problem, though, that seems like we’ve turned the wrong way.

Anyway I’ve written a lot about this in proportion to how much we actually know about what it will look like.

The “organisational changes” post also mentions that some traditional work, in areas not covered by GiveWell, may continue (although we have to wonder, why aren’t those areas covered by GiveWell?) and also – more intriguingly – there’s the prospect of some fundamentals research. This at least is something that GiveWell doesn’t do, although it turns out that there’s an organisation called the Foundational Research Institute and maybe there will be overlap there. I also wonder who on the GWWC team is qualified to do this research, and how that research will be directed. Again, it seems too early to say much about this.

There’s also the “Oxford Institute for Effective Altruism” on the way, but by the sounds of it that’s grant-funded and so not directly relevant to the question of whether to donate.