Our approach to maximising your impact
How do we help you direct your donations?
We may think that all charitable organizations have good intentions, that any assistance is beneficial, and that comparing solutions is either unjust or unproductive. Any progress from the prior situation is sufficient to justify some level of support. Over the past ten years, research in the field of charity effectiveness has shown that within any specific cause area, the impact of different charities' programs can vary greatly. The effectiveness of various solutions can differ substantially, and the approaches we intuitively consider are often not the most effective.
At Impactful Giving, we operate from the standpoint that to achieve the greatest good with your donations, it's essential to maximise impact by making deliberate and informed choices.
We prioritise critical problems and identify high-impact donation opportunities to provide you with the knowledge and guidance you need to make informed decisions that maximise the impact of your contributions
What do we mean by high impact and why does it matter?
"Impact" is a term that is often used but defined inconsistently. Non-profits have diverse methods for measuring impact, which makes comparison difficult due to the absence of standard metrics. Nonetheless, it is crucial for Impactful Giving to clarify its definition of impact—not only for transparency but also to comprehend how it is assessed to maximize the good we can achieve with our resources.
For Impactful Giving, a high-impact solution is one that is proven to be successful, based on evidence, and that can save or improve the highest number of lives per rupee—in other words, is cost-effective.
How vastly do the impact of various solutions differ?
For those looking to give, the world presents countless problems and an array of solutions to support. For example, if one wants to focus on improving public health, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of programs one might get behind, including boosting vaccinations, providing malaria bed nets, supporting people with non-communicable diseases, fighting malnutrition by distributing nutrients, and many more.
Do these interventions all have equally strong effects or enhance public health at the same pace? Is the impact of these interventions similar?
In short: it’s not.
A 2013 study examining global health interventions, using World Bank data, analysed 100 interventions in developing countries, including anti-malarial bed nets, vaccines, and various surgeries. The goal was to determine (as one possible metric) the years of healthy life these interventions produced per dollar invested.
The findings were striking. The most cost-effective interventions were about 50 times more effective than the median, 23 times more effective than the average, and nearly 10,000 times more impactful than the least effective options.
The data also revealed a heavy-tailed distribution, aligning with the 80-20 rule (Pareto Principle)—i.e., implementing just the top 20% of interventions would do about 80% as much good as implementing all of them. Even accounting for potential measurement imperfections and with acknowledgement of the challenges of such analysis, the increased impact of choosing evidence-based interventions is conservatively estimated to be at least tenfold.
It is surprising for most people to learn that solutions to the same problem can have drastically different success rates — sometimes by a factor of 10 to 100. By giving strategically to the most impactful solutions, you can make a much larger difference with your gifts.
Our goal at Impactful Giving is to help you achieve the greatest good possible by recommending programs that can save or improve the highest number of lives per rupee
How to maximise the impact of your donations
Depending on your starting point and where you currently donate, we believe you have the opportunity to maximise the impact of your donations by 10 to 100 times by giving to high-impact non-profits that run evidence-based and cost-effective programs in important but neglected cause areas.
At Impactful Giving, we gather and distil insights from leading research to identify and recommend high-impact giving opportunities for you to maximize your impact.