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Hm, curious how specifically this differs from GiveWell.
Announcing ImpactMatters: Auditing Charity Impact across Causes
2 min readDec 11, 2015
Hm, curious how specifically this differs from GiveWell.
They just say whether the charity is using an evidence-backed intervention or not, rather than trying to find the most effective organisation.
In particular, they apply this across all causes, providing options for donors out of global health and cash transfers.
I notice that ImpactMatters is using messaging I thought was EA-developed ("Choose a cause with your heart, but give with your head") and has one charity in common with TLYCS ("Possible"). Do you know how much EA overlap they have?
Dean Carlan has a long history of work on charity effectiveness and rigour long pre-dating EA. He has said on twitter that they took a lot of influence and inspiration from EA charity evaluators (esp Givewell). I think the best way of looking at this and much of his other work (for example Innovations for Poverty Action) is that it is EA-aligned organisation but not part of Effective Altruism as a "thing" since it comes from a different community and background and has a narrower focus ("are these charities effective at what they do" v "what overall is the most effective thing we can be doing")
How is ImpactMatters finding organizations to send Impact Audits? Are they by the request of the non-profit or would they be done in a non-solicited manner?
Impact Matters just launched today, an organization that is trying to complement GiveWell by auditing charities across sectors for their use of evidence and impact. In their own words:
We believe in a simple philosophy: choose your cause with your heart, but your nonprofit with your head. A powerful mission is just the start. Diligent donors then ask the next question: does the nonprofit use and produce appropriate evidence of impact on that mission?
We conduct “impact audits”, short-term engagements with two objectives:
The result is simple: nonprofits get tailored guidance on how to improve their use of evidence, and donors can be confident their charitable dollars are advancing the mission they care about.
ImpactMatters was founded by Yale economist Dean Karlan and his former student Elijah Goldberg in 2015 to solve two critical gaps in the nonprofit sector. First, nonprofits that want to be more evidence-based in their work often don't have the expertise or guidance to figure out how. Second, while we now know a lot more than a few decades ago about what does and doesn't work, for example to increase literacy or reduce child deaths, it is often difficult to map that evidence-base to nonprofits.
Enter the impact audit.
We call these two gaps the "nonprofit rating" problem. Many nonprofit organizations struggle to use evidence to guide their decision-making. Similarly, many donors struggle to assess the impact of nonprofits. An impact audit solves these related challenges:
We define success as follows:
Note they have been taken over by Charity Navigator; this has strong potential, but I'm concerned that it may not be done right. (See linked shortform post).