Hello everyone! 

I'm a fundraising and communications professional at a large frontline charity supporting survivors of domestic abuse and modern slavery in the UK.

A lot of my role sits between the people who want to do good and the services doing the work themselves, and I spend a lot of time engaging with EA thinking. I find it helpful, especially in pushing my organisation and others to be clearer and more innovative in how we report on impact. It has also raised a lot of questions for me about how different types of work show their value.

From practice, some charities find it harder to fit neatly into an EA frame, not because effectiveness is missing, but because the work is complex. In my organisation, frontline services deal with crisis and risk. Outcomes are shared with other systems, which makes attribution difficult. Impact exists, but it is not always easy to neatly isolate or clearly quantify.

Evidence raises similar issues. Many organisations track outcomes and learn from delivery, but some forms of data is simply more difficult to collect, and reporting methods are constantly being tweaked and improved. This does not remove the need for rigour, but it does shape what rigour has to look like in practice.

Cost and scale also deserve nuance. Some interventions are expensive because they need to be. They rely on skilled staff and safe delivery, and they do not scale quickly. EA frameworks are useful here in forcing clarity about trade-offs, even when the answer is not a simple cost-per-outcome figure.

These are a couple of my thoughts and observations from practice, but I would be keen to hear from the EA community directly. Do you steer clear of giving to causes that have less obvious alignment? What helps you trust a charity, and what makes you walk away?