How do you decide which charities to recommend?

Giving What We Can’s research team determines our annual recommendations based on thousands of hours of research from impact-focused third-party charity evaluators. The evaluators we use focus on:

• What a charity’s programmes do.
• How impactful those activities are.
• How cost-effective that is to support (loosely, how far your dollar goes when you donate).

We believe these are more accurate evaluative tools than relying solely on metrics like overhead (which isn’t actually a great indicator of impact) or financial health.

Since there are many impact-focused evaluators in the effective giving space, we determined that our research team could add additional value by more deeply investigating the research and approach of each of the evaluators whose research we rely on, or might rely on in the future. This allows us to better distinguish between their recommendations and advise donors which ones to follow based on their particular values and worldview. Our list of recommendations is based on the research of the evaluators we’ve looked into as part of our new research and found to be best-suited to helping you maximise the impact of your donations.

However, since this is a large undertaking, we have not yet looked into all of the evaluators whose research we’ve previously used, or that we expect to use in the future. Therefore, if you don’t see a charity on our list that used to be there, this does not necessarily mean we have changed our opinion of it. You can still support these programmes and others via our donation platform, which lists a range of organisations that broadly fit within our charitable purpose of doing promising work in a high-impact cause area, and we expect to add more recommendations soon. That said, we are particularly confident in the impact of the organisations we’ve included on our recommendations list since these are based on the research of impact-focused evaluators that we’ve recently vetted.