Choosing to give to highly effective charities can greatly increase the positive impact of your donations. ‘Infrastructure’ refers to the idea that creating additional resources and support to projects aiming to improve the world can multiply this impact.
Donating to improve the infrastructure available to effective projects (instead of to the projects carrying out this work directly) is sometimes called 'meta charity'.
Three of the best opportunities to multiply impact (of which we are currently aware) are through improving the quality and quantity of talent, information and capital available to solve the world’s biggest problems.
Choosing to give to highly effective charities can greatly increase the positive impact of your donations. ‘Infrastructure’ refers to the idea that creating additional resources and support to projects aiming to improve the world can multiply this impact.
Donating to improve the infrastructure available to effective projects (instead of to the projects carrying out this work directly) is sometimes called 'meta charity'.
Three of the best opportunities to multiply impact (of which we are currently aware) are through improving the quality and quantity of talent, information and capital available to solve the world’s biggest problems.
Improving talent
One of the most important factors in making progress towards solving the highest priority issues is the talent working on those issues. Some highly effective organizations are more talent-constrained than they are capital-constrained. In such cases, hiring the right talent is even more important than raising additional capital. Because of this, funding organizations that support and encourage talented people to work on high priority issues can significantly multiply the impact of your donation.
Choosing a high-impact cause area is often the most important driver of impact. Prioritization research could change our perception of a cause area or reveal promising new funding opportunities. As a result of research findings, many more donations may be directed to high-impact funding opportunities, meaning that the impact of a donation to fund the research itself would be multiplied.
Improving capital
Say that a $100,000 donation to a highly effective direct intervention can be used to save the lives of 15 people. Then imagine that a $100,000 donation to a meta charity that drives capital to that highly effective direct intervention is used to raise $1,000,000 more in donations. Assuming no diminishing returns, these donations can be used to save the lives of 150 people. In this example, exactly the same donation would be 10 times more effective when donated to the meta organization. (Note that this is a hypothetical to illustrate the concept, and that, in practice, estimates of these multipliers will be subject to substantial margins of error.)
Past meta initiatives have achieved sizable success, such as
80,000 Hours,
GiveWell or
Founders Pledge. With reasonably high confidence, we can say that donations to these organizations have caused significantly more resources to be invested in the highest priority areas than would have occurred through direct donations.
This said, finding and vetting meta opportunities can be both challenging and time-consuming.
The most intuitive meta donation options (that require the least vetting by potential donors), such as funding GiveWell’s operations, are often fully funded. Funding opportunities for these groups often appear only briefly and for specific projects.
Although there are a large number of early-stage opportunities, careful evaluation is required to identify the most credible and high-quality projects that demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of effectiveness principles.
Meta initiatives can be particularly challenging to evaluate and their stated metrics can require significant interpretation. Taking into account attribution, probability and discounting is important both quantitatively, when data is available, and qualitatively, when it is not.
Evaluating the team and leadership of a meta project requires context, experience and often a significant time commitment.