Multipliers, squared: multiplier evaluation of Giving Multiplier

As a part of Ambitious Impact (formerly, Charity Entrepreneurship)'s Research Training Program Fall 2023, some of the fellows have performed external evaluations of "giving multiplier" organizations - charities whose main job is to raise more donations to effective programs.

In this post, I share the executive summary of the evaluation I did on Giving Multiplier. For more details, you can check the full, 25-page report here. 

Disclaimer: this report has not been reviewed in its full length by AIM/CE staff, and does not represent their institutional assessment of Giving Multiplier (GM) or any other organization mentioned there. As for GM, even though this report counted on collaboration from their team and was shared with them before publication, it is an external evaluation and does not necessarily coincide with their views in all aspects.

Executive summary

This report assesses the cost-effectiveness of Giving Multiplier (GM), a Harvard-based research project and platform that allows and incentivizes people to make paired donations to their favorite charities and highly effective ones.

We do this by using the methodology developed by Founders Pledge and Giving What We Can. It includes calculating the gross and net giving multipliers - i.e., for each dollar invested in its operations, how many dollars can an organization raise for charities that operate above a community cost-effectiveness bar. To calculate these multipliers, we take into account the total money moved, labor opportunity costs, operating expenses, the proportion of the money that would have been donated to effective charities anyway, and the position of each target charity relative to the community bar.

Before we start the cost-effectiveness calculations, we first outline a Theory of Change for GM’s work and describe what is known about various assumptions behind it - we find most of them plausible, and the only unlikely assumption is common to every effective giving multiplier organization.

We also assess the quality of the monitoring and evaluation data used in the remainder of the report. Overall, we find it to be good enough for our purposes since donations are made (and recorded) directly on GM's platform. However, donor’s self-reporting biases and non-response effects may apply to data on counterfactuality. We also make recommendations for other monitoring and evaluation data that could help better segment their public, promote recurring donations, and assess the positive externalities of GM’s work.

We then proceed to calculate the average net multiplier and the marginal net multiplier. The average net multiplier between September 2020 and December 2023 is found to be between 5.4x (conservative estimate) and 18x (optimistic estimate). The marginal net multiplier for 2024 is found to be between an ineffective 0.32x (conservative) and 34x (optimistic). However, we are very uncertain about our estimates for both the estimates of the marginal multipliers.

Finally, we finish with a grading of the overall transparency of GM and close with some conclusions about the next steps for GM and the uncertainties surrounding its scalability and cost-effectiveness prospects. We surmise that GM can take advantage of important economies of scale in the next two years, but that scaling significantly while keeping their costs proportionally low will be a major challenge.

See the full report here. 

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Matt Coleman and Lucius Caviola from Giving Multiplier for being super open and collaborative during the evaluation process. And thanks to Charity Entrepreneurship's RTP team for supporting and making this research possible.