Why is your list of recommendations so short?

Charity evaluation that focuses on impact generally identifies particular types of charities that are likely to be highly effective through cause area prioritisation and programme prioritisation, and then does a deep evaluation of the charities that seem particularly promising (because of track record, approach, or something else) within that already narrowed scope. As such, the final list of top-rated charities will be shorter.

We believe the recommendations on our best charities list are considerably more impactful than average donation opportunities, but this doesn’t mean that these are the only charities that could be more impactful than average. Impact-focused charity evaluators generally can’t evaluate every charity that exists; they have to use reasoning and evidence to identify areas where it’s likely that charities could have considerable impact, and then evaluate a handful of promising charities in that area to see which ones meet their (typically quite high) impact and cost-effectiveness criteria.

If you are interested in donating to a charity not on this list, and want some clues about how its impact might rank compared to other giving opportunities, we recommend checking out our giving guides. That said, we think the best way to ensure your donations have impact is to follow the recommendations of impact-focused charity evaluators (and note that not all charity evaluators are impact-focused — see below.)

Our current list of recommendations is also shorter than we expect it to be in future years because we’ve based it on our evaluator research project, which is not yet complete. As such, we are only recommending charities from evaluators we’ve recently researched (see above).

We’re always interested to hear feedback from donors. Got some thoughts about our recommendations or don’t like what you see? Tell us.