Our Evaluators
Why do we need a non-profit evaluator?
With thousands of charities to choose from, deciding where to donate can be overwhelming. It's difficult to assess which organisations are truly making a meaningful impact, let alone determine which will use your donation most effectively.
How do you compare the effectiveness of charities working on vastly different causes?
How can you distinguish reliable information from marketing strategies?
This is where charity evaluators play a critical role. These independent institutions, staffed by researchers and experts, identify, compare, and evaluate the most impactful programs and non-profits. With years of experience conducting comprehensive research, they provide transparent, publicly accessible reports that shed light on which organisations make the most significant difference.
Charity evaluators maintain objectivity by operating without financial ties to the organisations they assess, ensuring unbiased and impartial evaluations. At Impactful Giving, we simplify this complex research, providing clear summaries so you can confidently support the most effective charities without spending hours navigating the data yourself.
Our criteria for choosing an evaluator
Focus on Impact: We prioritise evaluators who go beyond identifying charities with general impact, focusing instead on those achieving the greatest impact at any given time.
Focus on evidence-based and cost-effectiveness: These evaluators assess whether programs and interventions are evidence-based and conduct thorough analyses to estimate and compare the cost-effectiveness of various interventions.
Transparency: Transparency is crucial in evaluating an evaluator's work. We look for those who clearly disclose their evaluation criteria and methodologies, publicly share their findings and rationale, and are open about any mistakes they make, using them as opportunities to learn and improve.
We collaborate closely with our evaluators and grant-makers to continuously learn from their latest research, ensuring that the information we provide remains current and accurate.
It is important to acknowledge a limitation in our approach: charity research is a relatively new and evolving field. While our chosen evaluators meet our standards for impact, rigour, and transparency, this list is not exhaustive.
We are actively working to identify and include more evaluators and grant-makers in our recommendations. If you have suggestions on how we can improve our process or recommendations, please contact us at team@impactfulgiving.in.
Our partner evaluators
GiveWell
GiveWell is a leading non-profit research organisation dedicated to identifying the most cost-effective charities in global health and development. Each year, GiveWell invests over 50,000 hours into rigorous research to find programs and organisations that save or improve the most lives per dollar donated. Founded in 2007 by financial sector professionals who sought greater transparency in charitable giving, GiveWell has become a trusted organisation on evaluating the impact of health and poverty reduction efforts.
GiveWell's research focuses on a select number of charities that demonstrate the greatest impact per donation and can effectively utilise additional funds to save or improve lives. The organisation publishes its findings to guide donors toward the most impactful giving opportunities.
Founder's Pledge
Founders Pledge is a nonprofit organisation that brings together a global community of entrepreneurs committed to addressing the world's most pressing problems. Members of Founders Pledge commit to donating a portion of their personal proceeds to charitable causes.
To support them in making impactful contributions, Founders Pledge conducts extensive research to identify high-impact giving opportunities and shares these findings both with its members and the public.
Open Philanthropy
Open Philanthropy is a research-driven organisation dedicated to identifying and funding high-impact opportunities across a range of global issues. Open Philanthropy seeks to make transformative contributions to the fields of global health and development, animal welfare, biosecurity, and criminal justice reform, among others. The organisation leverages rigorous research and a data-driven approach to evaluate potential grant opportunities, aiming to maximise the impact of its philanthropic efforts.
They provide grants to organisations and initiatives that demonstrate a strong potential for significant, scalable change, are evidence-based, cost-effective, and often overlooked by traditional funders. In addition to grant-making, they also share their research and findings openly, contributing to greater transparency and knowledge-sharing in the philanthropic sector.
EA Animal Welfare Funds
The Animal Welfare Fund aims to improve the wellbeing of nonhuman animals by making grants that focus on one or more best-in-class opportunities. The EA Animal Welfare Fund is dedicated to reducing the suffering of animals worldwide through strategic and impactful grant-making.
Their funding focuses on interventions with the potential to create the greatest positive change for the largest number of animals. They have recommended over 20 million dollars' worth of grants to a range of high-impact initiatives including improving the welfare of animals in factory farms and reducing their suffering, working towards ending factory farming and research and the development of innovative solutions. They have a rigorous evaluation process to select the most effective interventions, and maintain accountability and openness in our resource allocation.
We are actively engaging with evaluators across various cause areas to identify additional giving opportunities in fields such as climate change, education, and mental health.
How Impactful Giving selects non-profit recommendations
We primarily base our recommendations for high-impact giving opportunities on the findings and recommendations of our partner evaluators. Additionally, we incorporate insights from other leading research institutions in India, such as J-PAL and Ashoka University, to inform our decisions. While we draw from their expertise, we maintain full independence and are not directly affiliated with any of these organisations. Our final decisions on which non-profits to include are made autonomously.