A reminder for any readers thinking of donating to charity: you can get the most bang for your charity buck by (1) donating publicly, e.g. through Facebook Causes, to help promote norms of charitable giving -- making it psychologically easier for others to follow suit, and (2) donating to a meta-charity like GiveWell.
If you'd like to join me in donating to GiveWell through Facebook, just click here. If you're not a Facebook user, you can still donate to GiveWell here (and then blog about it, or leave a comment here, to help promote the norm). Thanks!
Saturday, December 26, 2009
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Just two small notes on this:
ReplyDeleteFirst, whilst givewell looks great, it's worth pointing out that they assess charities by measurable outcomes. But some charities might do very good work that is unfortunately harder to measure. (e.g. charities that focus on targets over a longer timescale, or those that focus on changing ingrained societal norms.) That's not to say that givewell isn't helpful, but I don't think it's definitive.
Second, I also found the givingwhatwecan.org website really helpful. The links on http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/resources/charity-comparisons.php give some nice graphics showing various bits of empirical data.
(For those interested, in the end I gave my annual 1% of income donation to a combination of Avert, the International Red Cross, Refuge, and Wikipedia.)