Why do you highlight charities or funds that you haven’t recommended?

We are currently in the process of more deeply investigating each of the third-party evaluators whose research has informed our recommendations in previous years, or whose research we could consider using in the future (see below). We based this year’s recommendations on our evaluations of the evaluators we investigated first. This decision has some consequences for our best charities list, including:

• We are not including recommendations from evaluators we haven’t yet looked into. For example, we haven’t yet looked into Founders Pledge’s research, even though we plan to soon, and think some of its recommendations might be competitive with our own.
• We haven’t included recommendations for cause areas that we think could be impactful but have not yet investigated. For example, we haven’t included any recommendations for climate change or organisations working on “meta” effective giving (such as effective giving outreach or fundraising, or effective charity incubation).
• Our evaluations of evaluators have some limitations. See, for example, our reports on Animal Charity Evaluators and Happier Lives Institute, which explain some of these limitations.

Because of this, we decided to highlight a few other supported programmes in each cause area, based on our research team’s preliminary impression that they are promising alternatives to our recommendations and of interest to donors who want to investigate further. For example, we highlighted:

• A selection of Founders Pledge’s recommendations in a range of cause areas
• StrongMinds and some of Animal Charity Evaluators’ recommendations (as we think these could be competitive, but aren’t yet certain, as discussed here and here respectively)
• A selection of recommendations from other cause areas, like the EA Infrastructure Fund and Founders Pledge’s Climate Fund

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all promising programmes, nor a strong claim about the impact of supporting the highlighted supported programmes; it’s rather a spotlight on some of the many projects you can support via our platform that, for various reasons, are not on our recommendations list. We share more information about each of these programmes on their individual programme pages — we encourage donors to read these, and the resources they link to, before making a choice about where to give.