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Larissa Hesketh-Rowe

This weekend I battled against a tide of shoppers as I followed my brother to look at MP3 players. The shops were heaving with people. Why were so many people crowded in John Lewis on a Friday morning?

Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving which is said to signal the beginning of the shopping season in the run up to Christmas. It has spread from the US to other countries. Last year, Black Friday became 

the biggest UK shopping day of the year for the first time

Yet, despite all the hype around the Black Friday weekend and despite the noticeable crowds, sales have actually 

Well, retailers have been running sales for a lot longer to mitigate some of the chaos seen in stores in 2014. There has also been a big 

. During yesterday’s Cyber Monday shoppers were 

, almost a third more than last year, according to analysts at Experian-IMRG.

And perhaps people are looking for an alternative to relentless offers, adverts and spending.

If you are one of those people today is a day for you.

#GivingTuesday is a global day of giving.

, covering countries like The United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore, Canada, much of Latin America and Israel. It is an opportunity to come together to show the world why it’s good to give. Whether it’s making a donation, volunteering your time or just spreading the word, #GivingTuesday is here to encourage and remind us to give something back this festive season.

The simple idea behind #GivingTuesday is to encourage people, charities and businesses to donate time, money or their voice to help a good cause.

 the average spend per person on Black Friday in the US was $380.95. Even donating half of that instead could provide 25 anti malarial bed nets or 95 deworming tablets.

This shows that giving needn’t be a sacrifice, it is simply a different way to spend your money. It is a chance to do something really meaningful with your hard earned cash.

Here at Giving What We Can we are always encouraging others to join us in giving to 

), because that means helping more people. In some cases 

 by the Charities Aid Foundation, 35% of people in Britain say they will donate today as part of #GivingTuesday.

By donating to the best charities you can do even more. Our 

 are recommended because they do the most good with your donations. If you give to them this #GivingTuesday you know you’ll be helping as many people as possible.

For less than $7.50 you provide someone with a bednet to protect them against malaria if you give to the Against Malaria Foundation. That’s the best deal you’ll see all weekend.

Instead of sending your loved ones out into the sales to try and guess at what you might like, why not donate your Christmas this year? Ask friends and family to donate to a high impact charity for you as a gift rather than risking another novelty jumper. It is a lovely way to share the holiday season and give back.

Charity Science have done all the hard work for you with their popular 

Why not help us show others how much we can achieve by donating to the charities that do the most good?

Share this post or change your profile picture or cover photo to the ones below to show your support for giving well this #GivingTuesday.

#GivingTuesday is a fantastic way to get people thinking about giving - but it doesn’t have to stop there. Our members 

 of their income (1% for students, the unemployed and pensioners) to charities that will have the biggest impact.

If a typical US citizen gave 10% of his or her income to the right NGO, then every year 

they could distribute 700 mosquito nets, preventing 190 cases of malaria and 2 deaths, or treat 7,100 people for neglected tropical diseases

Even if you are not ready for the full pledge you can 

 to tackle extreme poverty, which is just incredible.

Together we can make a big difference. So give generously, give effectively and do good this #GivingTuesday.

Got the Black Friday Blues? Looking for an alternative to relentless sales, offers, adverts and spending? Today is the day for you. Happy #GivingTuesday!

Happy #GivingTuesday!

Coralie Oddy

According to research conducted by Bond across the UK, France, Germany and the USA, 80% of people agree with this statement:

‘Despite investment in aid, not much has changed for those in poverty over the last twenty years.’ [1]

Extreme poverty has actually halved over the last twenty years

Clearly, 80% of people have formed a belief about development based on unreliable evidence. Surely if we show them the real facts – with hard evidence to back up our claims - we can create a different attitude to international development and maximise giving?

In fact, the evidence would suggest it isn’t as simple as that. Statistics on poverty and the impact we can make convinced me to take the Giving What We Can pledge, but it is probably precisely because I’m drawn to statistics and evidence-based research that effective altruism appealed to me in the first place. It makes sense that facts and figures would help to convince the stereotypical Effective Altruist – the analyst, the programmer, the maths or philosophy graduate– but what of the population at large?

The 2014 Narrative Project sought to understand the public perception of international development, and how changing our ‘stories’ about aid can promote positive engagement

The research found that there was a generally negative perception of international development, with a focus on waste and what doesn’t work – rather than what does. Foreign aid is viewed as ‘a good idea done badly’.

the project identified an ‘undecided audience’ who - if reached in the right way - could significantly increase support for development and become effective donors.

The Narrative Project found that around a third of the public are ‘engaged’ with international development – they have some knowledge of the issues and regard ending poverty as at least ‘somewhat important’ – 

this represents a reachable audience for the Effective Altruism movement.

Yet the data on progress which so appeals to ‘natural’ EAs may fail to influence this group. Personal beliefs heavily impact the weight we give to facts. Perhaps instead of providing new research and clear infographics, 

we should be focusing on changing prevailing narratives about the impact of international development by telling stories which truly resonate with the public.

This formed the second part of The Narrative Project’s research. They explored the themes that were the most influential in creating positive perceptions of development and increasing the likelihood of donating. 

We need to emphasise these themes when we discuss Effective Altruism with potential new supporters

. The theme of self-reliance was found to be highly influential. We should always emphasise that the ‘end goal’ of development is to give everyone the opportunity to support themselves and achieve independence.

. We can make the moral case that opportunity is unfairly distributed, and people cannot help where they are born. We should emphasise that with the right support, people in poverty can access opportunities for independence and help themselves.

. We need to talk about people in poverty as individuals who share our aspirations and demonstrate ingenuity, ambition and pride. We should avoid ‘pity language’ and an overemphasis on suffering; while pity-based appeals create an instant emotional response, long-term they actually decrease engagement with development issues [4].

. We need to show that development works through the efforts of both donors and recipients. We can do this by highlighting the active role people in poverty take in achieving self-reliance, and show that effort, risk and responsibility is shared between developed and developing nations. Donor countries and celebrity patrons should not be positioned as ‘heroic’.

. Empowering women and girls resonates with the public, as this is something we can relate to in our own lives.

Using these themes, we can change beliefs about development, and create a new narrative about effective ways to eliminate poverty. For example, the UK NGO network Bond - a partner in The Narrative Project’s creation - highlighted ONE’s 

 for their ‘Poverty is Sexist’ campaign as a great example of the new narrative [5].

By focusing on empowering women and demonstrating shared values of pride, ambition and individual will to succeed, the video inspires action where it could have easily inspired pity and reinforced stereotypes about the developing world.

Switching the story on development can be the difference between deepened commitment and donor fatigue. By understanding what appeals to the public, we can make our own appeals significantly more effective.

According to research conducted across the UK, France, Germany and the USA, 80% of people agree with this statement: "Despite investment in aid, not much has changed for those in poverty over the last twenty years." But this statement is false.

Switching the story: how to change the narrative on development

Michelle Hutchinson

At Giving What We Can, we're all about measuring impact. So, we regularly review our progress and activities. We're pretty proud of our last 12 month period — here are some of the highlights.

We want to make sure that we're keeping members, donors, and the general public in the loop with what we've been doing, and what we've got planned for the future. If you need more detail, you can also download:

Giving What We Can review Jul 2014 - Jun 2015

, more than doubling the number of members we had in June last year, which took us up to 1,118 members.

 through the Trust to highly effective charities, donated by around 

 started around the world, bringing the total to around 40

We had a large surge in membership in December and January — 223 people joined in those two months alone (for comparison, that is nearly double the number who joined during the whole of 2013). This seemed to be spurred largely by a pledging event held by students linked with the chapter in Cambridge, and perhaps also by a rise in charitable activity associated with the giving season.

Around this time we realised it would be more efficient to move away from organising outreach events ourselves, towards supporting 

 to run these around the world. Jon Courtney, previously Director of Community, switched to Director of Outreach to focus more of his attention of chapters in March.

As part of this new focus, in the first half of 2015 we supported the development of 15 new chapters, bring the total to around 40. We have also noted from Skype conversations with nearly 200 (15%) of our members that being able to connect with the community is important to many of us. Chapters therefore appear increasingly valuable not only as channels for reaching more people, but for supporting current members and sustaining the Giving What We Can community.

In November 2014 we changed the wording of our 

. Before this, the pledge specified that donations should be made to the most effective charities 

. We opened up the wording to make it more in line with the spirit which underlies Giving What We Can - that we should simply be helping others as much as we can. The change in wording allowed people who believe they can most effectively help others in ways other than fighting extreme poverty (or believe that that will be the case in future) to join.

We chose to do this after several months consulting members and individuals within the effective altruism community. The community feeling within Giving What We Can seems to be unchanged. The benefits of the change are somewhat difficult to gauge so far. They will likely depend on the extent to which the effective altruism movement takes off and whether those affiliated with it do in fact end up joining and donating 10% to the most effective charities.

; Alison Woodman joined as Director of Community and Hauke Hillebrandt became Director of Research in March. In April Sam Deere was appointed Director of Communications.

Alison’s role will allow us to learn more about our current membership and therefore support our community, as well as track the impact we are having. Hauke is helping to develop a long-term research strategy and has written in-depth reports on each of our currently recommended charities. Sam is has been represented us in media appearances, talks and news articles, whilst also working on creating a new version of 

The full potential of chapters, particularly when they work on something they are really excited about – we estimate that the Cambridge pledge event led to 83 new members.

In research, our comparative advantage continues to be identifying crucial considerations, particularly those emerging from the academic literature – such as the link between soil-transmitted helminth infections and malaria. Continuing to keep up with these kinds of developments will therefore be a significant focus for us.

The usefulness of automating processes such as bookkeeping and some parts of outreach, and therefore the importance of having someone on staff with significant tech skills.

We have continued to be very fortunate in the volunteers we attract, which has been useful for research and for blog writing – not just our own, but also now for the Huffington Post. That is likely in part because of our excellent blog manager and in part because of being based in Oxford. Given the value this has brought, we should continue to try to be appealing for volunteers to work with.

We fundraised for our 2015 budget over a 2 month period in April - May. That was the wrong time of year from a tax perspective, and the long time frame meant we were uncertain about our financial position for a long time. We will therefore be fundraising for our 2016 budget over the first two weeks of December 2015.

We recently released our 12 month plan for July 2015 to June 2016 which you can read in full 

. Here’s a short summary of our goals and plans. Our primary metric for impact is number of members. We aim to have 2000 members by the end of June 2016.

Over this year a large part of our focus is going to be on improving our understanding of the journeys people take towards becoming members, and how we can improve them. We have developed a Pathway Model which makes explicit our underlying assumptions about how people move from being unaware of Giving What We Can to taking the Giving What We Can pledge, and offers suggestions of factors that influence whether they will advance through any of the intermediate steps.

Below are the main steps we have mapped out which influence the paths people to go through on the way to becoming members:

A) Making people aware of Giving What We Can and effective giving

C) Inspiring people to want to get involved

D) Encouraging people to become a part of Giving What We Can

E) Supporting people to remain long-term active members

It is likely that it will be higher value to put in work at some points of the pathway than others. One reason for this is the relative crowdedness of the different parts.

At the moment we are not planning to spend as much time on increasing awareness abouteffective giving and Giving What We Can as we are on later parts of the pathway. There are currently a number of people focusing on media attention for effective altruism and the relevant organisations, through books, mass media and conferences.

Two of the biggest ways in which we think we can contribute here are encouraging in-person meet-up groups and supporting people at later stages of the pathway. Supporting people at later stages of involvement seems more likely to be our comparative advantage, as it often requires long-term follow-up and time-consuming outreach to individual people, which volunteers are less likely to be in a good position to do.

We are currently in the process of carrying out a recruitment round, looking for both a research analyst and at least one person in an outreach role. The number of applicants we take will likely depend both on the quality of applications we receive, and how our fundraising goes.

We will be opening another round of fundraising at the beginning of December in order to raise our budget for 2016. In the next month we will be updating our impact evaluation estimates with recently-gathered data about donations made during 2014.

As always we’d love for more people to get involved in whatever ways they can. Here are just a few ideas:

Join a local group, or get in touch with Jon (

) about setting one up if there isn’t one nearby

Write for our blog. We’re always looking for people who are enthusiastic about writing for our blog. Whether or not you have a clear idea of what you’d like to write about, get in touch with Carolina (

), our blog manager, if you’d be interested.

Give us feedback. If you have comments about our website, community support, research, local groups or any other aspect of our work, we’d always welcome them. You can send feedback to 

Highlights from 2014 - 2015

Jean Davis

Cash Transfers: Helping Households Adapt to a Changing Climate

With 17 new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recently announced, the United Nations member states will again put eradicating poverty, in all it’s dimensions, at the heart of the global agenda.This time the focus is on sustainability, with environmental degradation and a changing climate being recognised as two of the greatest threats to meeting UN aspirations.

This year, it is estimated that global temperatures are set to rise one degrees centigrade above pre-industrial averages for the first time, halfway towards the two degree boundary that was agreed by parties at the 2010 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The next UNFCCC will occur in Paris in December this year and securing a high-ambition climate agreement will be key to achieving the SDGs and vice versa. Even with affirmative action the effect of a global climate deal won’t be truly felt until after 2030.[1]

Those whose livelihoods depend on the areas most vulnerable to climate change and with fewest resources will be disproportionately affected and less able to adapt to the effects. It is vital that governments put in place the social policies required in order to protect those most at risk. [1,2] The key to this is to connect the economic, social and environmental aspects of development absent in the Millennium Development Goals. The 2013 UN Report on the post-2015 development agenda states that ‘environment and development were never properly brought together. People were working hard – but often separately – on interlinked problems’.[1] Cash transfers are an effective, well-evidenced, scalable, cost-effective method to combine the above and help the most vulnerable households adapt to the effects of a changing climate before 2030.

This photograph was taken in 2012, when 13.3 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia, once again faced loss and suffering due to a drought, the worst in 60 years, in the region.

Cash transfers are direct, regular and predictable non-contributory payments that raise and smooth incomes. The goal is to reduce income poverty and vulnerability.[3] They can either be unconditional, in that they do not require recipients to engage in any specific activity (for example, to visit primary health care facilities) or conditional. These programmes have already provided well-evidenced interventions in a number of middle income and some low-income countries for general indicators in health, education and poverty reduction.[4]

Many of these indicators help to meet the existing needs of the poor and therefore assist households to adapt to climate change as they help families to survive in times of crisis. This includes many responses to stress that weaken the long term ability of families to deal with future challenges and improve their livelihoods long-term, especially for those living in rural areas. This might include selling productive assets like farm equipment and fertilisers or taking on high interest debt.[4,5]

For example, Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net System (PSNP) protects assets, such as food and livestock, from being sold to provide for immediate needs, and from the early harvesting of crops.[6] In many cases, families have even been able to invest in their long-term livelihoods further increasing their stability and adaptive capacity: after a cash transfer program in Zambia, Goat ownership by families in Zambia’s Komolo district went from 8.5% to 41.7%, the number of households investing in enterprise quadrupled and the average investment doubled after a cash transfer programme aimed at increasing entrepreneurship was introduced.[7]

Climate change interventions rely on complex models that are location specific and have high rates of uncertainty which makes them difficult to plan and scale.[4,11] Cash transfers do not require an understanding of these complexities, either by recipients or coordinating agencies, as the decision on spending lies at the household level.

The level of control given to households regarding their spending, sometimes with no conditions, raises concerns around an increase in the consumption of temptation good such as alcohol and cigarettes, however most evaluations have reported no significant increase in spending in these areas.[12] Social protection programmes are also often criticized for dissuading wage earning by working adults, however cash transfers are evidenced to lead to reduced child labor and at most modest disincentives to work in some cases.[12]

Some of the best examples of cash transfer programmes originate in Latin America and were designed with strong monitoring and evaluation structures in place, which has lead to robust learning and expansion4. For example, Mexico’s Oportunidades Conditional Cash Transfer Programme reduced the poverty of beneficiaries by 30% and that of the poorest of the poor by 45% (by some measures). This suggests that the most important reductions in poverty are taking place among the poorest households[8,9], which makes cash transfer an excellent candidate for targeting the poorest of the poor.

Cash transfer programmes can be easily adapted to meet local needs and capacities, or target specific indicators important to organizations and governments. [4] In addition, well-documented monitoring and evaluation data have lead to the building of excellent frameworks for implementation. Cash transfer has been shown to be no more expensive than other interventions with similar outcomes, though like-to-like comparison of cost-efficiency is exceptionally difficult to measure; however, generally cash transfers have lower administrative and overhead fees.[10]

The success of the SDGs is intertwined with the progression of climate change. We must think about the effect that climate change will have on the poorest and most vulnerable within society who are least able to adapt and help households adapt by 2030.Cash transfers are a no-regret social policy with a range of indirect outcomes, and few, if any negative consequences, that can be used to achieve this. As some of the most well evidenced, easy to adopt and scalable interventions cash transfer programmes have great potential. However they are no panacea, and require multi-level sustainable development of the economy, society and environment to be ultimately effective.

DAVIES, M., A. Barrientos, S. Devereux, S. Hickey, R. Sabates-Wheeler, B. Guenther, and I. Macauslan. UN, 2013:A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies Through Sustainable Development. The Report of the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. 2013

Blog

Happy #GivingTuesday!

Switching the story: how to change the narrative on development

Highlights from 2014 - 2015

Where should we donate to do the most good? - Essay Competition 3rd Prize

Where should we donate to do the most good? - Essay Competition Runner up

Reach for systemic change

Where should we donate to do the most good? - Essay Competition Winner

Giving What We Can for People of Faith

Maternal Age Matters: for a lifetime, and longer

How To Overcome the Disappointment of Not Receiving This Year's Nobel Prize for Medicine