Michael Gintz

October 27, 2026: How I evaluate charities

I'm going to start with the advertisement: if you're impact-minded potential philanthropic donor, and you want a free and accessible way to understand impact and compare organizations in a way that aligns with your values, then I recommend the following procedure (based on my Impact Workbook: I recommend you check it out!: link to the Impact Workbook and instructions):

1. Find a list of charities to consider. I suggest the following procedure:
   1. Start by adding a few organizations from impactful-charities lists:
      • Causeway is a platform owned by CharityNavigator that has a few curated lists of impactful charities. As of writing they have the following categories.
        • Animal Welfare Fund
        • Climate Change Fund
        • End Homelessness Fund
        • End Hunger Fund
        • Environmental Action Fund
        • Global Health Fund
        • Global Poverty Fund
        • Improve Education Fund
        • LGBTQIA+ Support Fund
        • Veterans & Military Assistance Fund
        • Womens Health & Wellbeing Fund
      • The Happier Lives Institute attempts to measure impact by subjective wellbeing.
      • Givewell seeks to "save or improve lives the most per dollar."
   2. For causes or demographics you feel are under-represented by these companies relative to your own values, go out and search for a few that seem worth considering. Like shopping for cereal or financial products, there are a lot of organizations out there, and you probably don't have time in one lifetime to personally sit with them all, so be realistic about how much time and energy you want to spend searching for options. This is not the step where you really inspect whether a charity deserves your money—we simply want to do a reasonable amount of looking for options before we restrict our attention to those options.
2. Fill out Impact Workbooks for each: get the Impact Workbook and a link to the instructions here. See the list of Impact Workbooks I've already filled out.
3. Gaze upon your filled-out Impact Worksheets, and make a decision by whatever methods you choose. (If you find none which are acceptable for you to give to, decide whether you want to go back, spend more time adding charities to your list, and start the process over.)

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There are many ways to donate your money. We consider the following predicaments:

Predicament 1. I've got some money that I want to donate to a good cause, but I'm not sure where it should go, if anywhere.

Predicament 2. I've got some money that I want to donate to a good cause, and an organization I might want it to go to, but I'm not sure whether I ought to give it to them.

For impact-focused individuals, those who are significantly interested in what their donation will do when faced with these kinds of predicaments, Predicament 1 is often solved by undergoing the following three-step process:

1. Narrow the list of organizations I want to donate to down to a meaningfully finite list.
2. Determine, for each of these organizations, the impact my donation would have.
3. Give to some subset of them based on these determinations.

This process can be easily modified to solve Predicament 2 by knocking off the first step.

The Impact Workbook seeks most directly to address the second step. I believe the Impact Workbook came from a few different frustrations while trying to complete this step:

1. The rigidity of cost-effectiveness evaluators. I want to find a charity that's cost-effective, that is, relative to how much money it spends, I want it to produce a lot of value. This kind of calculation is pretty difficult: there are lots of questions you have to ask yourself which are not only hard to answer but also hard to intuit the implications of. Luckily there are actually a great number of organizations who are solely or significantly dedicated to answering this question: Givewell, CharityNavigator's Causeway, GivingWhatWeCan, the Happier Lives Insitute, and others. For many, their answers are pretty highly satisfying. A lot of these organizations flex strong research arms. However, (as evidenced by the fact that there are so many of these), problems arise for you if you don't agree with all of the assumptions of one of these organizations. You can still greatly benefit from the research that they're doing if you're interested in the causes they care about (and luckily, in my opinion, most of these causes are pretty uncontroversial and should appeal to many), but if there is a cause that you care about that they don't, not only will they probably not have looked into it but also this may impact the relevance of their "top picks" to you.

The two attempted solutions the world had to this problem until now were:

• paying a team of researchers yourself, or
• doing a bunch of hardcore research yourself, or
• using the Impact Genome's registry, which has since been made private.

The first two of these were unsatisfying for price and accessibility reasons, and the third (when it was still free and available) still left a lot to be desired: there was still a finite amount of categories (somewhere in the 130s) that were considered, and each organization was measured within each of those categories was measured by some system standardized in a way that was opaque to the user and specific to the values of the team. Furthermore, there was no tool that allowed you to weigh each of those categories against each other and then be presented with the most effective organization for you (creating such a tool by recreating a lot of their work so as to not steal their IP was the first form of my plan), and there were no benchmarks available to help make a tool to suggest effective avenues of giving (which, again, would have been made much simpler to do independently if their information was freely available to be scraped and analyzed).

2. Lack of trust / abundance of information. Charities have a strong incentive to talk up their impact, be it through representing one outcome in many ways, downplaying inefficiency, or simply stating things in confusing ways. However, when trying to shovel through their provided information yourself, it can feel like a firehose to figure out what all an organization is up to without a procedure for distilling that information, and even after finding out what they do it can feel overwhelming to try to weigh a large amount of very distinct outcomes with a bunch of financial information.

With these two in mind, the Impact Workbook provides a procedure for:

• synthesizing a philanthropic organization into its component parts,
• evaluating those parts using any available information, at the level of depth desired by the user and using their own personal values without having to compromise to those of a steward organization.

I think it will help especially people who have felt these types of ways about philanthropic giving: if any of this speaks to you, I recommend you check it out!

Finally, before formally ending this post, I want to make a caveat on the use of the Impact Workbook: you don't have to just donate to the organization that has the highest Value per Dollar Spent when you're done. This is for a couple reasons:

• Looking at these relative values might make you question how much you value different things, or realize that you weren't really evaluating the quantiites the same way.
• You might find yourself saying "I feel more motivated to give to someone nearby, even though it is less cost-effective." Whether you think this is a moral fault or not, this thinking often keeps people from giving at all, since they don't feel motivated to give to the more effective organization but also don't feel right giving to a less effective one that they are more motivated to give to otherwise. I encourage you to give effectively and to recognize how much less efficient your choices are than the most efficient ones according to your own values, but if you believe that there is positive value in giving, then give to something rather than nothing.

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P.S. (some notes about the process)

I originally envisioned a webtool that would:

• Ask you about your values at a high level, going more specific where it felt like it was needed,
• determine numerical weights for different charitable outcomes, based on your answers, and then
• spit out the charities which are most cost-effective to you based on these weights.

I began with 100 or so categories that an organization's outcomes could be partitioned into, and then attempted to measure stated charitable outcomes against benchmarks in these categories. However, what I realized was that not only was there very little research avaiable to make solid benchmarks either on efficiency or impact, but these categories were so broad that a user who wanted to determine if their values were represented by the tool would basically be doing the same amount of work as is currently required by the Impact Workbook, but in a much more inconvenient form. Thus the Impact Workbook was born.