EA - Evidence of effectiveness and transparency of a few effective giving organisations by Vasco Grilo

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Evidence of effectiveness and transparency of a few effective giving organisations, published by Vasco Grilo on July 1, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryEffective giving can be quite impactful.I estimated the factual non-marginal multipliers until 2021 of Ayuda Efectiva (Spain), Doebem (Brazil), Effektiv Spenden (Germany), and Giving What We Can (GWWC), i.e. how much donations they moved per dollar spent. Those of Ayuda Efectiva (1.34) and Doebem (5.53) are much lower than those of Effektiv Spenden (61.2) and GWWC (135).However, the results might differ accounting for future donations (received after 2021, but caused until then), counterfactuals, diminishing marginal returns, cost-effectiveness of caused donations, and indirect impacts of effective giving. Furthermore, the organisations were at different levels of maturity. Consequently, my estimates for the factual non-marginal multipliers are not directly comparable, and I do not know which of the 4 organisations are more effective at the margin.I did not find any proper cost-effectiveness analyses of Ayuda Efectiva, Doebem or Effektiv Spenden. I encourage these and other effective giving organisations as well as their funders (namely, Open Philanthropy) to do and publish cost-effectiveness analyses of their work (ideally including the indirect impacts of effective giving), as GWWC has done.IntroductionEffective giving can be quite impactful:Supporting with 0.399 $/year the corporate campaigns for chicken welfare of The Humane League might be enough to neutralise the suffering of factory-farmed animals caused by a random person. This estimate can easily be off by a factor of 10, but illustrates that the (financial and non-financial) costs/savings of switching to a fully plant-based diet may well be much higher.Helen Keller International’s vitamin A supplementation program has a cost-effectiveness of 3.5 k$ per life saved, i.e. one can save 13.8 lives (= 48.3/3.5) for the average transaction price of new cars in the United States in April 2023 of 48.3 k$.So there are good reasons for giving effectively and significantly to become a cultural norm. This is a primary goal of effective giving organisations, and I have estimated the factual non-marginal multiplier of a few of them to get a sense of whether they are accomplishing it effectively. To clarify:A factual non-marginal multiplier of x means the effective giving organisation moved x $ of donations (hopefully to effective organisations) for each dollar it spent.A counterfactual non-marginal multiplier of y means the effective giving organisation caused y $ of donations for each dollar it spent.A counterfactual marginal multiplier of z means the effective giving organisation would have caused z $ of donations for each additional dollar it had spent.y < x because effective giving organisations do not cause all the donations they move, and z < y owing to diminishing marginal returns. The effective giving organisations is underfunded if z < 1, as long as the counterfactual marginal multiplier includes all relevant effects.I was curious about Ayuda Efectiva and Doebem because their results could be more generalisable to Portugal (where I am from). I looked into Effektiv Spenden owing to it being regarded as a successful example of effective giving, and included GWWC as a major reference in this space.MethodsI calculated the factual non-marginal multipliers from the ratio between donations received to be directed towards effective organisations and costs. I neglected future donations, and did not account for the opportunity cost of workers and volunteers. The greater the future donations, the greater my underestimation of the factual multipliers. The greater the opportunity cost, the greater my overestimation of the factual non-marginal multi...