Deyan

- While they don’t make it as easy to give from their site as they might, another place where folks can find highly recommended organizations is the FastCompany “Social Capitalist” awards winners:
http://www.fastcompany.com/social/2008/index.html
At the very least, this group of orgs makes me feel better about my giving (since a number of the places where I give because of personal connections are listed there ).

- I don’t know if you have done so already, but a really interesting future blog post (or Tactical Philanthropy Forum!) would be a compare/contrast between the GiveWell approach to recommending non-profits and the Philanthropedia approach.

I think both orgs are doing fascinating work, but I also think there are some significant potential criticisms to be made of each approach.

With GiveWell, I wonder whether their reliance on data makes them miss too many high quality non-profits that for (understandable) reasons don’t have the data they need to prove effectiveness and whether a world where GiveWell is much more important would be a world where non-profits actually spend too much time/energy/money on data collection and begin to only take on projects that are easily trackable versus projects they believe would deliver more impact but would be harder to get metrics on.

I think the Philanthropedia approach arguably solves both of these problems, but what I wonder about them is whether their experts really are able to identify the most effective orgs or whether they are susceptible to being blinded by charismatic non-profit leaders and media hype.

It is interesting in that regard that a number of Philanthropedia’s “mutual fund orgs” are actually non-profits that GiveWell explicitly does NOT recommend: http://blog.givewell.net/?p=505

In the argument about who is right about these orgs, I’m inclined to have more faith in GiveWell’s recommendations (a combination of my own experience with “experts” and GiveWell’s greater transparency about how they came to their conclusions; while Philanthropedia’s general approach is transparent, I don’t think it’s possible to know how the experts came to their conclusions), but I suspect the Philanthropedia approach is more scaleable.

In any case, I think it would be really interesting for Tactical Philanthropy to go deeper on this issue.

So I’d guess I’d amend my comment to say that if you’re interested in giving to an international aid, microfinance, or climate change org (and you care about maximizing the value of your donation), you’re best off starting with the organizations recommended by the orgs above (and winnowing from there).

That said, I would confess that only about 40% of my giving this year went through those two orgs. I also gave directly to 30 or so other organizations, generally for one of three reasons:
- I was personally invested in those orgs (either because I used to work in them or because they actually directly serve my family).
- I was asked to give to an organization by someone I know.
- I gave because the org was one I wanted to identify with in some way.
And while I don’t think any of those reasons is “wrong” (and I will doubtless continue to give for all three reasons), if I’m honest with myself all these gifts were more about me than about others.

I think the world would likely be at least somewhat better off if I directed more of my giving to the best non-profits (rather than ones where I just have my personal connection), so one of my goals for 2010 is to direct more of my giving to those organizations that I can be confident are doing the best work.

Although I think part of the answer to this is not just to give more through GiveWell and Philanthropedia but to try to also take steps so that the orgs where I have personal connections ARE the best orgs.

If social good was fungible, so that good of any kind was equal, and donors didn’t care where or what kind of good they created I’d agree with you. But that’s not how donors actually operate (nor should they in my opinion).

Instead, I would recommend that folks uses these organizations’ recommendations as a starting point and focus their energy on trying to decide which of their recommended organizations most excites them.