Comments
138
Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
A few things I'd love input on from this community:
What data points matter most to you when evaluating a charity? Right now GiveRadar shows registration status, financial filings, and cross-references against sanctions lists. But I'm curious what the EA community would actually want to see when looking up an organization. Program spend ratios? Staff size relative to budget? Something else entirely?
Also, if anyone has experience with charity data in countries I haven't covered yet, I'd love to hear about it. Especially interested in leads for Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia where registry data is hardest to find.
And for those who work with IATI, Open Sanctions, or similar open data sources, I'm curious if you've found ways to link organization identifiers across datasets reliably. Deduplication across 25+ country registries has been one of the trickiest technical challenges so far.
Happy to share more about the methodology, data sources, or architecture if anyone is interested.