Hi EA'ers,
I've got a question for you all about the best way to invest limited benefit-cost evaluation resources. I wonder if folks have any thoughts about the relative value of evaluating small group of highly effective -- and typically small -- charities, versus spending additional resources to evaluate large charities which may not be as cost-effective..
Ideally, everyone would give to the most effective charities, but the fact is that larger charities -- from United Way on down -- receive the bulk of giving dollars and have a disproportionate impact on how giving happens and how it's evaluated.
EA tends to focus most of its evaluation resources on a few, targeted charities. While this is obviously important, it also seems to me that we are missing some "low-hanging fruit" by not spending more evaluation resources on a wider range of charities. Directing resources to more fully evaluate and improve the cost-effectiveness of large charities could have a larger "meta" benefit-cost ratio, in the sense of the value of an evaluation dollar in increasing the benefit-cost ratio of other dollars spent.
For example, the Salvation Army received $2 billion in donations last year. Assuming that the money donated to it is roughly fixed, and not (unfortunately) very sensitive to rigorous measures of impact, then increasing its cost-effectiveness by only a small amount could have a greater net effect than further in-depth evaluations of smaller charities.
I've longed dreamed of a mega-database that would include detailed cost-effectiveness measures for lots of charities, as I think this would import the ideas of EA into a much greater pool of giving money and help it gain political strength. Such a project would need some pretty intensive resources, however.
I'm interested in your thoughts!
This is an excellent question.
Givewell has written about this:
http://www.givewell.org/search/google/Mega-charities?query=Mega-charities&cx=007119284953973998335%3Arwakucpx-to&cof=FORID%3A11&sitesearch=&safe=medium
My sense is that UNICEF is the most effective big (health) charity - they do lots of highly effective health interventions:
But their effectiveness might be diluted because they spend money on non-priority interventions and countries that are not among the least developed countries such as the DRC, where AMF is active.
One thing that has changed since the Givewell posts have been written is that UN agencies (among them UNICEF) have become more transparent, but it's still hard to see what exactly they spend their money on: ati.publishwhatyoufund.org/index-2014/results/
You can see UNICEF's spending on their 7 programme areas here:
http://www.unicef.org/strategicplan/files/2013-ABL4-Integrated_budget-ODS-English.pdf
and then look at the thematic reports here:
http://www.unicef.org/publicpartnerships/66662_66837.html
where they give a breakdown of what they spend their money on in the programme areas (it's still quite crude, I couldn't find out what they spend on which vaccine, but the data might be out there- I just couldn't find it).
You could do a back of the envelope calculation and see whether they're on average better than AMF, and I would not be super terribly surprised, but that doesn't mean that your marginal dollar that you donate to UNICEF will have a bigger impact. It's very difficult to properly ring fence money and restrict funding to priority areas when giving to UNICEF as a small donor, because they might just shift money around (using their considerable unrestricted funding to do that). I'm also not sure whether when you go on the UNICEF website and click 'I want to provide a family with a bednet', whether that then is really going into the restricted funding pot.
If the EA movement were to grow considerably, we might be able to ringfence money properly, by looking at UNICEFs projected spending and the immunization expenditure line and then say 'we want you to spend more on immunizations' or use Social Impact Bonds: 'if everyone in country x is immunized against measles, the EA community will pay X million $'.
Givewell has recently had a post on 'Charities we'd like to see' and they wish for an immunization charity, but I'm not sure whether there ever will be one.