A FIELD GUIDE TO REASONING ABOUT IMPACT - Effective Altruism in Practice

I started putting together an Effective Altruism field guide because I was struggling to connect all the things I was learning.

Over the past year, I’ve been reading, exploring different resources, learning through practical experience, meeting people working in the field, attending the Effective Altruism In-Depth Program, and studying development management at prestigious  SPJIMR Mumbai.

I read Doing Good Better, explored EA principles and frameworks, and kept finding more interesting resources across different websites (rethink priorities, 80000 hours, coefficient giving, give well etc etc), organisations and research papers.

But I often found myself going back and forth between them, trying to connect the concepts and understand how they could be applied to real decisions.

How do you decide which problems deserve more attention? 

How do you assess whether a programme is actually making a difference? 

How do you compare two interventions when they produce very different outcomes? 

And how do you decide whether to fund a programme, run a pilot, invest in more research or take a different approach altogether?

These questions felt particularly relevant to me because of my own background.

I have spent more than a decade working in risk management, internal audit, finance, cost optimisation, compliance and governance. My work has involved examining evidence, questioning assumptions, evaluating risks and understanding whether resources are being used effectively.

Through my development management education and work in the social sector, I’ve been looking at these questions from another perspective: not just whether an organisation is operating efficiently, but whether its work is achieving meaningful outcomes.

I wanted to bring some of this learning together in a way that would be useful to others facing similar questions.

That’s how Effective Altruism in Practice: A Field Guide came about.

What will you find in the guide?

It brings together selected concepts, frameworks, examples and practical tools from existing Effective Altruism resources, organised around the journey from understanding a problem to making and evaluating a decision.

Some of the questions it explores include:

• Choosing which problems to work on: How do scale, neglectedness and tractability help us think about which problems deserve more attention? How can we compare causes responsibly without pretending that every outcome is easy to measure?
• Understanding whether an intervention works: How do we move from a problem to a plausible theory of change? What evidence supports the causal links? What might have happened even if the intervention had never existed?
• Thinking about impact and costs: How can back-of-the-envelope calculations and cost-effectiveness analysis help us compare options? What do measures such as DALYs, QALYs and WALYs attempt to capture, and where do these comparisons become difficult?
• Making decisions under uncertainty: How should we think about expected value, assumptions, base rates and sensitivity analysis? When is it worth collecting more information, running a pilot or acting on the evidence we already have?
• Making better funding decisions: How can donors and grantmakers assess interventions, organisational health, room for more funding and the likely marginal impact of an additional grant? How should limited budgets be allocated across competing opportunities?
• Moving from analysis to implementation: How do we account for an organisation’s ability to deliver, learn from results and adapt its strategy? What are the common mistakes we make when evaluating impact?
• Thinking about careers and personal contribution: How can we assess our own strengths, comparative advantage and career options when trying to contribute to important problems?

The guide also includes integrated case studies covering child anaemia, animal welfare strategies, grant assessment and a career transition, along with worksheets and a decision framework intended to help translate concepts into practice.

Who might find it useful?

I hope it can help people who are just beginning to explore Effective Altruism find a starting point without having to navigate dozens of resources independently.

It may also be useful for nonprofit leaders, programme managers, researchers, grant writers, grantmakers, donors, philanthropic organisations, CSR teams and professionals considering a transition into impact-focused work.

For someone designing a programme, it may help structure the questions to ask before implementation. For a grantmaker, it may offer a starting point for examining an application beyond its immediate outputs. For someone evaluating an intervention, it may help identify assumptions, evidence gaps and alternative explanations for the results.

It is not a substitute for deeper research or the original sources. My intention is to make some of the material easier to understand, connect and use as a starting point for further learning.

Why I’m sharing it now

This is a personal learning and synthesis project, not an official EA publication or a claim to have developed these frameworks myself.

I selected the topics, worked on the sequence and structure, and tried to simplify the explanations using examples wherever possible. AI tools helped me refine the wording, improve readability and develop the visual presentation. The underlying ideas draw on existing resources, which are referenced in the document.

I would particularly value feedback from people with experience in Effective Altruism, philanthropy, impact evaluation, animal welfare and development. What is missing? Where have I oversimplified something? Which examples could be better? What would make this more useful when someone faces an actual funding, programme or career decision?

If there is interest, perhaps we could form a small group to discuss the guide and improve it together. I would be happy to incorporate useful suggestions in future versions and acknowledge the people who contribute.

I’m also curious whether this material could eventually be developed into a course, workshop, reading group or printed resource. These are only ideas at this stage. I’d like to understand whether they would be useful before deciding what, if anything, to pursue.

For now, I’m sharing the guide in the hope that it can help others learn, ask better questions and make more informed decisions about how they contribute.

If you work in any of these areas, are exploring Effective Altruism for the first time, or would simply like to help improve the resource, I’d love to hear from you. 

Thanks a lot to @David Varga , one of the facilitators of our EA In-Depth Program, for taking a look at the guide and encouraging me to share it with the wider community.

Here is the link to the document: 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RT1HHwQWqsGDDvi0QPYFxMNW15fnalbI/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=113398165980619547269&rtpof=true&sd=true

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