The post The Trust Gap: What Funders Can Learn from MacKenzie Scott’s Giving appeared first on The Center for Effective Philanthropy.
Center for Effective Philanthropy | https://cep.org/feed/Emerging Impacts: Going Deeper on the Effects of MacKenzie Scott’s Large, Unrestricted Gifts
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Center for Effective Philanthropy | https://cep.org/feed/Public and Private in an Era of Entrepreneurial Philanthropy: Exploring John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems (1927/2016) to (Re)conceptualize Philanthropy as a Public
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. In debates about the role(s) and scale of entrepreneurial philanthropy in democracies, scholars discuss the erosion of distinctive public and private spheres and interests, and the replacement of the public sphere. This has occurred at the expense of public deliberation and participation, in favor of the reification of individuals and the role of experts/expertise. Drawing upon John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems (1927/2016), I argue that there is an eclipse of the publicity of the public. This informs my case for the (re)conceptualization of philanthropy as a public, characterized by (a) the philanthropist as a social rather than an atomistic being, (b) the philanthropy-state dynamic and the publics’ claims, and (c) part of the radical vision of philanthropy. To ensure that private and public have analytical and practical resonance, it is imperative to (re)frame and (re)conceptualize what these concepts mean to entrepreneurial philanthropy and for its role in democracies.
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly | https://journals.sagepub.com/action/showFeed?ui=0&mi=ehikzz&ai=2b4&jc=nvsb&type=etoc&feed=rssExploring the Evolutionary Boundaries of Community Business
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Community businesses contribute to the economic and social well-being of the communities in which they operate. As a subset of hybrid organizations, community businesses have unique challenges and opportunities related to their community embeddedness. Our study adopts an institutional logic perspective to understand the evolutionary boundaries of community business, which we argue, are shaped by the interplay of tensions between the social, market, and community logics. While existing literature discusses institutional logics from a dichotomous angle, focusing mainly on the social and market logics, we argue that the introduction of a third logic (i.e., community logics) has ramifications for the evolution of hybrid organizations. The different trajectories may have implications for the social, community, and economic impact that organizations can have. We draw on 39 qualitative interviews to provide useful insights for policy and practice on supporting community businesses.
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly | https://journals.sagepub.com/action/showFeed?ui=0&mi=ehikzz&ai=2b4&jc=nvsb&type=etoc&feed=rss
GiveWell’s 2023 recommendations to donors
We’re excited about the impact donors can have by supporting our All Grants Fund and our Top Charities Fund. For donors who want to support the programs we’re most confident in, we recommend the Top Charities Fund, which is allocated among our four top charities. For donors with a higher degree of trust in GiveWell and willingness to take on more risk, our top recommendation is the All Grants Fund, which goes to a wider range of opportunities and may have higher impact per dollar. Read more about the options for giving below. We estimate that donations to the programs we recommend can save a life for roughly $5,000 on average,[1] or have similarly strong impact by increasing incomes or preventing suffering.
Why your support matters
We expect to find more outstanding giving opportunities than we can fully fund unless our community of supporters substantially increases its giving. Figures like $5,000 per life saved are rough estimates; while we spend thousands of hours on our cost-effectiveness analyses, they’re still inherently uncertain. But the bottom line is that we think donors have the opportunity to do a huge amount of good by supporting the programs we recommend.
For a concrete sense of what a donation can do, let’s focus briefly on seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), which involves distributing preventive medication to young children. We’ve directed funding to Malaria Consortium to implement SMC in several countries, including Burkina Faso.[2]
In Burkina Faso, community health promoters go from household to household across the country, every month during the rainy season (when malaria is most common). They give medicine to each child under the age of five, which involves mixing a medicated tablet into water and then spoon-feeding the medicine to infants and having young children drink it from a cup. They also give caregivers instructions to give additional preventive medicine over the next two days.
It costs roughly $6 to reach a child with a full season’s worth of SMC (though this figure doesn’t account for fungibility, which pushes our estimate of overall cost-effectiveness downward).[3] If a child receives a full course of SMC, we estimate that they’re about five times less likely to get malaria during the rainy season (which is when roughly 70% of cases occur).
Community distributor providing SMC medication to a child sitting on mother’s
Weaving Trust-Based Philanthropy into a Participatory Initiative
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Center for Effective Philanthropy | https://cep.org/feed/To Pay or Not to Pay? The Effects of Monetary Compensation on Volunteers in Sports Clubs
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Previous research has shown that monetary compensation can crowd out intrinsic motivation for various activities. However, the existing evidence regarding voluntary work is limited and has produced inconclusive findings in the past. This study aims to address this research gap by investigating how monetary compensation affects the supply of voluntary work in the context of volunteer coaches in sports clubs in Germany. A propensity score matching approach is employed to consider a potential selection bias. The results show no evidence for a crowding-out phenomenon and instead indicate positive effects on the supplied hours and numerous items measuring the retention and recruitment of volunteers. The findings are robust when analyzing the sample based on whether the motivation leans more toward intrinsic or extrinsic.
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly | https://journals.sagepub.com/action/showFeed?ui=0&mi=ehikzz&ai=2b4&jc=nvsb&type=etoc&feed=rssBook Review: The nature of the nonprofit sector
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print.
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly | https://journals.sagepub.com/action/showFeed?ui=0&mi=ehikzz&ai=2b4&jc=nvsb&type=etoc&feed=rssPhilanthropy’s Role in Making Climate Change a Greater Bipartisan Priority
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Center for Effective Philanthropy | https://cep.org/feed/The Value of Being Nonprofit: A New Look at Hansmann’s Contract Failure Theory
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. In his theory about the role of nonprofit enterprise, Henry Hansmann suggested that nonprofit status provides important information to consumers in low-information environments. In this article, we assess whether consumers use nonprofit status to form purchasing preferences as Hansmann predicted. Using choice-based conjoint analysis, we find that under different types of low-information circumstances, study participants prefer goods and services provided by nonprofits to those offered by businesses. In the absence of additional information (such as customer ratings and third-party certifications), nonprofit status serves as an important value signal to consumers. In the presence of additional information, nonprofit status is still relevant in some cases, although it becomes less so. The findings suggest that additional forms of information do not necessarily displace the value to consumers of information about organization type. We reflect on these findings in light of Hansmann’s thesis.
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly | https://journals.sagepub.com/action/showFeed?ui=0&mi=ehikzz&ai=2b4&jc=nvsb&type=etoc&feed=rssNovember 2023 updates
Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!
If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here.
Research updates
We’ve recently published a number of new research pages—below are a few highlights. If you’d like to sign up for email updates whenever we publish new research materials, you can do so here.
Perennial malaria chemoprevention in Ghana
In February 2023, GiveWell recommended a $1.6 million grant to PATH to coordinate a randomized controlled trial measuring the effectiveness of malaria interventions for infants and young children living in areas with perennial transmissions of malaria. The trial, which will take place in Ghana, will compare the effects of administering the RTS,S malaria vaccine and perennial malaria chemoprevention (PMC) together versus the effects of administering only the vaccine. These types of trials can provide evidence to governments about the most effective malaria programs for their settings.
Water chlorination in Kenya, India, and Nigeria
In January 2023, GiveWell recommended a $1.8 million grant to the Development Innovation Lab (DIL) at the University of Chicago to conduct research on water chlorination programs in Kenya and develop plans for additional research on chlorination in India and Nigeria. We think water chlorination is a cost-effective way to avert deaths and have recently made several grants to support chlorination programs. The results of this grant will improve our understanding of such programs and could potentially lead to more funding for them in the future.
Organizational support for IRD Global
In April 2023, GiveWell recommended a $5.4 million grant to IRD Global for organizational support. We believe IRD Global has the potential to be an unusually promising grantee because of its emphasis on high-quality evidence, transparency, and proven operational capacity in areas with high disease burdens. We expect this grant will strengthen the organization and increase its likelihood of implementing cost-effective programs in the future.
Updates from top charities
New Incentives
New Incentives recently announced that it has enrolled over 1 million infants in its immunization program so far in 2023, more than in all previous years combined! In this video, Magaji Soja,
Deploying Funding for Scale: Four Lessons from Funders
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Center for Effective Philanthropy | https://cep.org/feed/
How we work, #2: We look at specific opportunities, not just general interventions
This post is the second in a multi-part series, covering how GiveWell works and what we fund. The first post, on cost-effectiveness, is here. Through these posts, we hope to give a better understanding of our research and decision-making.
Looking forward, not just backward
When we consider recommending funding, we don’t just want to know whether a program has generally been cost-effective in the past—we want to know how additional funding would be used.
People sometimes think of GiveWell as recommending entire programs or organizations. This was more accurate in GiveWell’s early days, but now we tend to narrow in on specific opportunities. Rather than asking whether it is cost-effective to deliver long-lasting insecticide-treated nets in general, we ask more specific questions, such as whether it is cost-effective to fund net distributions in 2023 in the Nigerian states of Benue, Plateau, and Zamfara, given the local burden of malaria and the costs of delivering nets in those states.
Geographic factors affecting cost-effectiveness
The same program can vary widely in cost-effectiveness across locations. The burden of a disease in a particular place is often a key factor in determining overall cost-effectiveness. All else equal, it’s much more impactful to deliver vitamin A supplements in areas with high rates of vitamin A deficiency than in areas where almost everyone consumes sufficient vitamin A as part of their diet. Similarly, one of our top charities, New Incentives, has chosen to operate in northern Nigeria largely because relatively low baseline vaccination rates mean its work is especially impactful there.[1]
As another example, we estimate it costs roughly the same amount for the Against Malaria Foundation to deliver an insecticide-treated net in Chad as it does in Guinea (about $4 in both locations). But, we estimate that malaria-attributable deaths of young children in the absence of nets would be roughly 5 times higher in Guinea than in Chad (roughly 8.8 deaths per 1,000 per year versus roughly 1.7 per 1,000), which leads AMF’s program to be much more cost-effective in Guinea. Overall, we estimate that AMF’s program is around 27x cash in Guinea and around 5x cash in Chad.[2]
This map from Our World in Data gives a sense of how deaths from malaria vary worldwide.[3]
Because cost-effectiveness varies with geography, we ask questions specific to the countries or regions where a program
Givewell Blog | http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheGivewellBlogInvesting in the Black Rural South to Enable Social Mobility Nationwide
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Center for Effective Philanthropy | https://cep.org/feed/Editors’ Note: Honoring the Legacy of David Horton Smith
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Volume 52, Issue 6, Page 1513-1514, December 2023.
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly | https://journals.sagepub.com/action/showFeed?ui=0&mi=ehikzz&ai=2b4&jc=nvsb&type=etoc&feed=rssLetting Lived Experience Lead the Way
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Center for Effective Philanthropy | https://cep.org/feed/CEP2023 Day 3: But for (Effective) Philanthropy
The post CEP2023 Day 3: But for (Effective) Philanthropy appeared first on The Center for Effective Philanthropy.
Center for Effective Philanthropy | https://cep.org/feed/CEP2023 Day Two: Trick or Treating for Grantmakers
The post CEP2023 Day Two: Trick or Treating for Grantmakers appeared first on The Center for Effective Philanthropy.
Center for Effective Philanthropy | https://cep.org/feed/CEP2023 Day One: Philanthropy Leaders Gather in Boston
The post CEP2023 Day One: Philanthropy Leaders Gather in Boston appeared first on The Center for Effective Philanthropy.
Center for Effective Philanthropy | https://cep.org/feed/How we work, #1: Cost-effectiveness is generally the most important factor in our recommendations
This post is the first in a multi-part series, covering how GiveWell works and what we fund. We’ll add links to the later posts here as they’re published. Through these posts, we hope to give a better understanding of our research and decision-making.
Why cost-effectiveness matters
The core question we try to answer in our research is: How much good can you do by giving money to a certain program?
Consider how much good your donation could do if you give to a program that costs $50,000 to save a life versus one that costs $5,000 to save a life (which is roughly what we estimate for our top charities). Giving to the latter would have 10 times more impact. While in an ideal world both programs would receive funding, we focus on identifying the most cost-effective programs so that the limited amount of funding available can make the greatest difference.
The basics
We’ve written in detail here about our approach to cost-effectiveness analysis and its limitations. Our bottom-line estimates are always uncertain, and we don’t expect them to be literally true. At the same time, they help us compare programs to each other so that we can direct funding where we believe it will have the greatest impact.
At a very high level, assessing cost-effectiveness generally involves looking at:
The cost per person reached. For example, how much does it cost to treat one child with vitamin A supplementation for one year?
The outcomes of the program. Determining these outcomes often involves examining two factors:
The overall burden of a problem. For instance, how many kids who will be reached with vitamin A supplementation would otherwise have died?[1]
The effect the program has. For example, how much does vitamin A supplementation reduce mortality rates relative to that baseline, and are there other benefits to providing vitamin A?
We use unconditional cash transfers as a benchmark for comparing opportunities, such that a program is estimated to be “12x cash” if we believe it’s 12 times more impactful per dollar than giving money directly to people living in poverty. In other words, if we estimate that a program is 12x cash, we think donating $100 to that program does as much good as donating $1,200 to a program that delivers unconditional cash transfers.
More detail
We aim to come to an all-things-considered view that