EA - Local charity evaluation: Lessons from the "Maximum Impact" Program in Israel by Yonatan Schoen

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: Local charity evaluation: Lessons from the "Maximum Impact" Program in Israel, published by Yonatan Schoen on August 27, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TL;DRMaximum Impact program, led by Effective Altruism Israel, aims to significantly increase the impact of Israeli philanthropy by conducting nonprofit evaluations, identifying high-impact local nonprofits (even if their recipients are abroad), and promoting effective giving. Additionally, we aim to strengthen the community internally by developing a replicable model that could achieve these goals in other local communities and by building the Israeli EA community through action-oriented projects.During the last year, we joined forces with promising non-profits and conducted and published 21 cost-effectiveness analyses. Together with an acclaimed team of expert judges, we identified 3 nonprofits as relatively cost-effective, with Smoke-Free Israel, a tobacco taxation nonprofit, which might be competitive with top charities. We learnt a lot from the pilot and have many ways to improve the program, but overall the pilot was successful: we identified high-impact local nonprofits and have engaged Israeli philanthropies interested in cost-effectiveness and in the results of the program. Finally, having a large-scale program on nonprofit effectiveness was a huge boost for EA Israel's community building, and many people heard about EA and became more involved because of the program. We're looking forward to continuing to maximize the impact of Israelis and to share the knowledge and experience we gained with the EA community.MotivationWe identified that global effective giving platforms currently don't "meet donors where they are" and only offer recommendations on global nonprofits without being able to engage donors; Donors who are initially interested in local donations but can later be introduced and nudged to give to global high-impact nonprofits.Israeli and Jewish donors abroad (~17.2bn per annum) currently donate almost entirely without evidence and cost-effectiveness estimations, as the Israeli non-profit ecosystem doesn't yet emphasize these as prerequisites for donations.With almost no research currently available on local effectiveness and a strong bias of donors towards donating locally, there are not enough impact-based donations in the local nonprofit sector.Based on discussions with EAs worldwide, we assume this problem is not unique to Israel and would like to find a cost-effective way to solve it.What have we done so far?Our research programIn our 10-month program, we chose 25 promising nonprofits from more than 160 applications from Israeli-based NGOs, 21 of which successfully published their first-ever cost-effectiveness reports. In the pilot program, we provided guidance and assistance to support non-profits to execute a cost-effectiveness analysis. After the research period, we sent the reports to a team of expert judges for review, and chose the most promising non-profits based on the expert review. We offered monetary incentives to encourage nonprofits to participate: 15 nonprofits received preliminary research grants of $6k, the 3 top outstanding nonprofits received $24k prizes, and $26k was allocated to a donation matching campaign to all nonprofits who publish a report. A private donor and an Infrastructure Fund grant funded the pilot.Guiding nonprofits on evaluation and improvementWe implemented various tools and resources to help incentivize and enable non-profits to conduct robust effectiveness analyses, including:An extensive set of templates and how-tos.Research grants for 10 young academic researchers (MA and PHDs) from Israel's top universities to conduct research with the organizations and join the EA community during the process.Personal guidance from skilled community...