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Tom Ash

The Centre for Effective Altruism is looking for a Director of Development

We are looking for a Director of Development to join our team in Oxford! The right candidate would play a vital role growing and sustaining the donor base that enables Giving What We Can and our sister charity 

 to serve their charitable missions. You can read more about the role below. If you're interested in this opportunity please apply 

 by 28th February (and if you know anyone else who might be interested, we encourage you to pass this opportunity on to them).

Note that this is just one of many job and internship opportunities that are available with our parent charity, the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) - for a full list, see 

CEA is a young and rapidly growing charity which has grown to a £300,000 annual budget over 18 months. We are located in central Oxford and affiliated with Oxford University. As described above, in this role you'll be fundraising for both Giving What We Can and the other innovative organisation that is part of CEA - 80,000 Hours. CEA has a track record of incubating new charitable projects and is continuing to expand into new areas.

In order to meet its growth targets CEA has set the ambitious goal of raising an extra £150,000 over the next year. Currently CEA is funded primarily by 'high net worth' individuals, but also by a number of medium-sized donors and grants.

For this role we are interested in people with previous experience in fundraising, in particular the following activities:

Writing fundraising materials (e.g. pitching projects).

Identifying, establishing and building relationships with major donors.

More general donor relationship management.

The ideal candidate would also have a degree, be a fast and compelling writer, cope well with stress, and be keen to work with a young team in a startup environment.

Contract details: We would be willing to pay up to £40,000, depending on experience.

For more details on this and the other roles we are recruiting for, see 

. Note that as well as employees, we are also always looking for interns to join us on our popular 

 for this and the other jobs that we are recruiting for. The deadline for applications is 28th February 2014 at 5pm GMT. If you have any questions at any stage of the process, please contact 

recruitment@centreforeffectivealtruism.org

We look forward to one of you joining us soon!

Michelle Hutchinson

Could you be our new Director of Community?

Giving What We Can is looking for an enthusiastic, friendly and dedicated individual to be our Director of Community! This role involves keeping in close contact with our community of members (currently 430). It means being the main point of contact for people considering whether to join Giving What We Can, to offer advice and support in their decision. The ideal candidate would be confident and knowledgeable about effective giving, allowing them to give presentations and talk to journalists with authority. Please read below for more details. For information on applying, please see our 

Giving What We Can is an ambitious non-profit that raises money for the charities that most effectively reduce global poverty, and is one of the flagship organisations of the global 'effective altruist' movement. It does this in large part by asking people to pledge to donate 10% of their income to the best charities that they are aware of. To date, Giving What We Can's 430 members have collectively pledged over £100 million!

The Director of Community is an essential part of our team, and of the process by which we have impact in helping those in poverty. We have found that in order to be willing to pledge to give 10% of their income for the rest of their lives, people need personal contact with a friendly member of staff who can answer their questions and introduce them to other people doing the same.

We are looking for someone willing to stay in this role for a significant period of time. If successful, this person could eventually oversee a team of people attracting and engaging members. They would work closely with the Director of Communications who would help to generate interest amongst prospective members and the Executive Director who would set the strategic direction of the organisation.

Be at the heart of an inspiring community of people who care about others and really put their passion into practice

: We have members all around the world, all of whom are dedicating a large part of their income to helping people in the developing world as much as they can, and supporting each other in doing so. You would be getting to know these members, answering their questions, providing support to them and helping them to help others.

Work with friendly and intellectual staff:

 You’d be working alongside a talented, interesting and highly motivated team.

 Giving What We Can shares an office with the rest of the Centre for Effective Altruism and with the Future of Humanity Institute, which is part of the University of Oxford. There are always fascinating people around, and we often hold joint seminars and training sessions, as well as many social events.

Be part of a fast-growing organisation and social movement:

 It’s a hugely exciting place to be, and has opportunities for swiftly increasing responsibility

 Each new member of Giving What We Can saves around 10 lives, meaning that the right person in this job could help prevent over 100 unnecessary deaths each year!

Be extroverted, friendly, and excited about talking to up to 20 people each week.

Be comfortable asking people directly to give to charity, or take our 10% giving pledge.

Over time, become on a first name basis with hundreds of people who are part of our charitable community.

Be able to manage email threads with 10-30 prospective members simultaneously, and send them joining information via post in a timely fashion.

be able to write well for our members' newsletter and blog

be comfortable speaking publicly, or to journalists, about giving and cost effectiveness research

be able to use our CRM to track potential and existing members

have some knowledge of the key concepts related to cost effective giving

be able to manage members who volunteer running chapters around the world.

We would be willing to have a start salary between £18,000 and £30,000, depending on experience. Giving What We Can operates in the University of Oxford's offices in Oxford.

You can apply for our Director of Community position by clicking here

George McGowan

The Giving What We Can Trust

Giving What We Can recently set up a charitable trust to help you ensure your donations reach the most effective charities. You can now donate to our top recommended charities by visiting 

If you want to give to charities based in other countries, such as Project Healthy Children, then we can get you Gift Aid on your donations - usually a very difficult process.

If you want to donate to multiple charities, you don't have to go to a donations page for each of them - you can simply give money to the trust and tell us how you want it distributed.

You don't have to choose between our top charities if you don't want to. You simply give to the trust and we'll allocate the money. We currently allocate money equally to each of our recommended charities, although if you would like to specify the proportion of your donation that each charity gets, you are welcome to do so.

You don't have to keep up with our recommendations: if you set up a standing order to our trust, then even if our recommendations change, your donations will go to our updated recommended charities. In this way, you can continue to go to the best causes without you changing your standing order.

It is a way of allowing Giving What We Can to monitor your donations, ensuring that if you are a member, you will not be expected to complete the giving review each year, saving you the time of tracking your own donations.

The process of donating to the trust is described in more detail on 

You sign up to the trust, letting us know what proportion of your money you'd like to give to which charity.

You then start giving to the trust, deciding how much you want to give and whether you want to give a recurring donation. You can give via bank transfer, cheque, PayPal or GoCardless.

We claim gift aid and send the money to the charity. We send the money to our charities quarterly by default. Although you are able to specify if you want your donation made at whatever time, and at whatever intervals you wish.

To clarify, there are only tax-benefits for people in the UK who donate through the trust. We may launch similar vehicles in other countries if the trust proves successful.

We'd love to hear your questions or comments! Please leave a comment or email 

Chloe Kane

Dispensers for Safe Water

Inadequacies in the area of water, sanitation and hygiene (known collectively as WASH), are responsible for a huge number of health problems throughout the developing world, including diarrhoea, the leading cause of childhood mortality. As outlined in our WASH 

, research in the WASH sector has often produced conflicting and ambiguous results as to which interventions are effective. However, two world-class research institutions, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and Poverty Action Lab (JPAL), believing that progress could be made in this area, carried out a series of randomized control trials (RCTs) to try and find a solution. The results of these trials provided strong evidence that installing chlorine dispensers next to water sources is a highly effective method of ensuring the chlorination of unsafe water. Convinced of the effectiveness of chlorine by existing research, 

 (DSW) was then launched. Giving What We Can has been researching DSW since September, and believes that on many measures it looks like a highly cost-effective charity with promising opportunity for leverage. Despite this, we hesitate to include DSW among our top charities at this time, because we have lingering concerns about the strength of the existing evidence for the efficacy of water quality interventions.

What makes chlorine dispensers good - four problems, DSW's solutions:

783 million people in the world, or 11% of the global population lack access to safe drinking water. As a result, people are drinking water contaminated with bacteria that lead to diseases such as diarrhoea.

Water can be treated with disinfectants, and some research has shown chlorine to be particularly effective here, suggesting a 29-35% reduction in diarrhoea. This is due in part to its significant residual effect: it keeps water safe from recontamination for the period over which we expect water to be retained (usually only 24 hours).

Even when the health benefits are well-known, chlorine isn't used if people have to pay for it.

The chlorine from dispensers is free. On top of this, instead of the distribution of individual bottles of chlorine as some charities and trials have done, DSW's system is much more cost-effective - only one dispenser is needed for the whole community.

The public nature of the dispensers, and their location next to water sources serve as a reminder. On top of this, DSW uses community education and local promoters to encourage usage. In keeping with their evidence-based practice, they have carried out RCTs in order to ensure that that such promotion has the widest possible impact, and is continued over a long period of time. The outcome of this is a programme that has seen an average adoption rate of 43% in the scaled up programme. This compares to adoption rates in other WASH interventions of 5 -10%.

WASH interventions are often neglected, and end up in disrepair because maintenance is costly.

DSW has been set up with the idea that it provides a service - not just the initial infrastructure. Maintenance costs have not only been factored into the organisation's budget, but they have once again carried out RCTs in order to ensure that they are using the most effective methods for this part of the programme too.

Scaling up - Dispensers for Safe Water and Evidence Action

Given their early successes, DSW is in the process of scaling up their programme with the aim of reaching 25 million people in Africa by the end of 2018. DSW is now part of the larger organisation 

 that also runs another of our recommended charities, 

, though you can continue to donate directly to both projects.

There are several key elements of their scaling up model that give us reason to believe that DSW will continue to be effective:

DSW carries out research and pilots in regions into which it is considering expanding, in order to determine whether it is a suitable destination for the chlorine dispenser system. In addition, it carefully monitors any partner organizations to ensure that best practice continues to be used.

The Kyoto protocol allows organizations to gain carbon credits if they can show that the activity they are carrying out reduces carbon usage. Since using chlorine means that people no longer have to boil their water in attempts to purify it, DSW earns carbon credits which it can then sell in carbon markets such as the European Union Emissions Trading System. Because of this, they are able to cover a large amount of the fixed costs of running the organization, allowing more of the donated money to be spent on chlorine and dispensers.

The DSW scaling model is such that as the programme is expanded, average costs will increasingly fall. This is because chlorine supply chain costs, and maintenance costs will be lower if several can be attended to in one round. This means that even if DSW expands into areas with lower rates of diarrhoea such that potentially fewer lives would be saved for a given amount of money, the reduced costs overall offset this worry, and permit them to expand into more regions.

Because of the carbon credits system they are using, DSW hopes to be financially sustainable by 2018. That is, once they reach a certain scale (the projected 25 million people) the carbon credits system should be raising enough money to sustain the project without need for further donations. However, to reach that point they have a substantial funding gap to make up. Since a large part of their model is based on economies of scale, donations will be increasingly valuable in making it to this goal.

Current internal estimates supplied to us by DSW put the net cost of one DALY averted at $67.5. DSW estimate that one dispenser with a life-time of 5 years averts 3.97 DALYs, relying on estimates of diarrheal reduction due to Fewtrell et al. (2005) and Kremer et al. (2009). The marginal gross cost for a dispenser of this kind installed in 2014 is $671, but the net cost of $268 is significantly lower due to sale of carbon credits.

The internal cost-effectiveness estimate is indicative of a highly cost-effective charity. In addition, two things should be noted. The figure given is a conservative estimate based on the minimum number of diarrhoea-related deaths averted. This figure doesn't take into account the benefits of the prevention of other water-borne diseases that chlorine dispensers help to prevent, and so DSW's programs may well have a larger potential benefit than this estimate indicates. In addition, costs are expected to decline over time due to economies of scale.

In spite of DSW's many positive aspects, we remain cautious about recommending them at this time. This is due to our uncertainty about the current evidence for water treatment interventions. As GiveWell explore in comprehensive detail in their

, despite many randomized control trials that demonstrate efficacy for water treatment interventions in reducing diarrhoeal disease, the small number of blinded trials to date have failed to find evidence of an effect. While the blinded trials are smaller in number, they also represent a higher standard of evidence. Like GiveWell, we don't believe that we have encountered an adequate explanation for this discrepancy that would allow us to entirely discount the null results reported in blinded trials. As a result, whilst DSW looks highly promising, at the moment we cannot recommend them as a top charity. However, we believe that they are likely to be among the most effective WASH charities, and quite possibly the most effective in this area. Furthermore, future research on water interventions may well resolve our lingering concerns regarding the evidence for water treatment interventions.

Giving What We Can

Three myths about charity you should be aware of

 about foreign aid, and decided to contribute, with three further myths about individual giving. If you've been inspired to help combat extreme poverty, we hope this video can help you to make a big difference with your donations.

Krisztina Csortea

'Can we really end poverty?' an intelligence2 debate

 organized a debate on whether ending poverty is possible, and a video recording of the event is now available 

. The deadline for the first set of Millennium Development Goals is coming up in 2015, and new goals are being formulated now. The panelists discussed the progress of MDGs so far and the next set of challenges facing poverty elimination. If you ever wondered how to be smarter about aid and whether China can serve as a model for Africa or about how to get to "zero poverty" and then stay there, this is well worth a watch!

Stephanie Crampin

Stop the myth today

Myth: We give money to Africa and nothing changes.

This is just one of the false and dangerous ideas that Bill Gates sets out to tackle in his latest campaign against poverty. 

 of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for 2014 sets out three common misconceptions about government aid, and presents arguments to show that they are mistaken. Not only that, these myths actively cause harm by discouraging people from donating, and thereby preventing poor people from making the progress needed to lift themselves out of poverty.

You can see the full series of Gates’ videos on our 

Gates tackles the first myth that ‘poor countries are doomed to stay poor’, by demonstrating that in fact, “the world is better than it has ever been”. In the last fifty years, there has been a significant improvement in infant mortality rates in many countries, and a huge improvement in welfare in countries such as China and Mexico that have moved from ‘developing’ into the ‘middle income’ bracket. The idea that we can’t do anything to help is harmful as it prevents us from investing our own funds in interventions that will greatly improve the lives of many people.

It’s important to combat these myths and, once the facts are in place, to think carefully about individual giving, and about where you personally can have the most impact. This is because it’s not just the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that can make a huge difference to people’s lives; by giving as little as 10% of your own income, you can dramatically and realistically improve the lives of thousands of people. Put plainly, the facts are:

We are spending less on aid than we think, and less than we think we should.

We can each make a great difference individually, and together we can end extreme poverty in this lifetime.

Corruption only makes it more important to give to the best charities.

We can help people in developing countries to help themselves, rather than depend on assistance.

The best health interventions are likely to reduce the problem of overpopulation rather than making it worse.

The best way to avoid the potential pitfalls of aid is to carefully consider which charity to give to. Find out which charities can best use your donation on our 

Peter Hurford

'Giving Games' and Giving What We Can: an Interview with Jon Behar

Jon Behar left a lucrative job at an investment management firm to pursue dreams of running philanthropic projects. Behar runs a startup called 

 which uses a model called "Giving Games". These games are run at colleges and other areas around the world and engage people in discussions about effective giving.

Rob Wiblin and I sat down to interview Jon Behar and learn more about Giving Games. Here's what we learned:

"Giving Games" are a way to get people engaged in discussing effective philanthropy by asking them to chose where to give a pot of money from two pre-selected choices;

These games can be used to experimentally test why people don't give more effectively and find ways to encourage them to give more and give better;

Donating to Giving Games could be an option to leverage an existing donation to a 

Our mission is simple and consistent with the mission of "Giving What We Can" - encouraging people to both give more generously and more effectively than they otherwise would. I aim to accomplish this by running "Giving Games", which is just a very simple way to engage people in conversations about effective giving. We gather people together and have a conversation about which charity they would like to give to from a few pre-selected options. The group is also given real funds to make a real donation, which gives participants a sense of ownership over the decision and also engages them in a conversation that encourages them to take a strategic approach to giving.

So far we've run about 25 Giving Games, most of which have taken place at colleges, though several were online and in other settings.

I see the model as a way to experimentally test why people fail to give effectively and see if we can find any methods to get them onto giving effectively. A Path That's Clear can test these things as hypotheses. Maybe people are afraid of putting up their own money? Well A Path That's Clear provides the money needed to make the decision. Maybe people don't have easy access to high-quality information on effective charities? A Path That's Clear can provide that information. Maybe people just think that "charity begins at home"? We can test that by running a Giving Game with a local non-profit and a non-profit working in the developing world.

What are some of the results of the Giving Games?

Right now, we're looking at the decisions players make to see if they actually give to more effective charities and see if they are thinking more about strategic giving. We do this through post-game surveys that ask players about their experiences and then also by getting feedback from the moderator of the Game.

The actual results of the Games are encouraging - in nearly all the games, the players have selected the more effective charity. But more importantly, players are indicating that their experience in the Game has changed how they think about philanthropy; they resolve to do more research and think about impact the next time they personally give.

We've also taken audio recordings of the Giving Games so I can listen in and the conversation flows freely. One of the driving factors for this is that we're not just getting a random group together, but rather a group with lots of existing social ties (club, sports team, dorm room floor, class) that are already comfortable with each other.

How has the model changed, if at all, in response to these trials?

 against, not another charity, but rather the option of letting players keep the money themselves. In this game, people chose AMF, but this decision was probably too obvious and the discussion was not as deep as we would have hoped. Once we decided to make the conversation about two different effective charities or about testing critical notions like "giving begins at home", we found the conversations started really going somewhere.

What's your plan for scaling this up? Who are you going to target? And what is your plan for making this sustainable?

In the long-term, I'd like to institutionalize this process at as many schools, universities, and workplaces as I can, though our main focus is on colleges and universities. I want to embed this conversation about how one can do the most good and make this part of the college experience.

We ran a Giving Game at Brandeis University with 25 students as part of their orientation process. That could serve as a pilot to hopefully making the Giving Game or this type of discussion part of the welcoming process of all students. I have started to very recently partner with The 