Back of the Envelope Guide to Philanthropy

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Quantitative charity evaluation. This website serves as a resource for assessing the impact of different charitable organizations and endeavors. The phrase Back of the Envelope comes from the sciences where it refers to rough calculations that while not precise tend to support a line of reasoning. We are actively seeking from the public improvements to these evaluations and additional evaluations.

This data may be read in two ways. As an indictment of how poor a job society does in allocating resources, or as praise for well targeted high-impact philanthropy.

The Leverage Factor measures how effective each charitable organization or endeavor is. A Leverage Factor of 10 means that for each $1 invested in the organization or endeavor it delivers $10 worth of societal value. Not all charitable endeavors lend themselves to quantitative assessment, but for those that do we attempt to assess them here. In many cases a range of Leverage Factors are reported indicating uncertainty regarding the true Leverage Factor.

Don't get too hung up by the precise Leverage Factors reported. They are bound to be wrong by at least a factor of 2. The key take away is that charitable effectiveness spans at least a 100,000 fold range. Give wisely.

Top 10	Leverage Factor
Hostile artificial intelligence	900,000 - 6,000,000
Farm animal welfare (if number of animals in pain counts)	300,000 - 1,500,000
ACTION	200,000 - 400,000
Giving What We Can	100,000 - 400,000
GiveWell	40,000 - 250,000
Aging research	70,000
STI treatment	20,000 - 90,000
Nanoplague	25,000 - 70,000
Antibiotic resistance (animal feed)	15,000 - 110,000
HIV prevention (mass media campaign)	30,000
Umbilical cord care	30,000
Urban land reform	13,000 - 50,000
Jubilee USA	15,000 - 40,000
Childhood pneumonia	20,000

Others	Leverage Factor
HIV prevention (sex workers)	8,000 - 30,000
Lymphatic filariasis treatment	2,000 - 90,000
Emergency training	13,000
Immunization	13,000
Postpartum hemorrhage treatement	13,000
Sleep research	10,000 - 15,000
Artesunate for severe malaria	12,000
Leishmaniasis treatment	10,000
Tobacco	3,000 - 30,000
Farm animal welfare (if brainy pain counts)	4,000 - 20,000
Malaria prevention	4,000 - 20,000
Nothing But Nets	2,500 - 20,000
Down syndrome screening	6,000
Tuberculosis treatment	6,000
Malaria research	4,000 - 9,000
Trypanosomiasis treatment	6,000
VillageReach	5,000
GAVI Alliance	2,000 - 12,000
HIV prevention (male circumcision)	3,000 - 7,000
Traffic accident prevention	4,000
Tuberculosis research	3,000 - 6,000
Heart attack treatment (developing world)	2,000 - 7,000
Generic microcredit	3,000
Assisted delivery devices	2,500
Onchocerciasis prevention	2,500
Trachoma treatment	2,500
Iron fortification	2,000
Malnutrition treatment	2,000
WaterAid	1,500? - 2,000?
Tuberculosis prevention	1,100 - 1,500
Deworming	1,100
Cancer research	800 - 1,500
MSF / Doctors Without Borders	250 - 2,000
Bioterrorism	100 - 4,000
Iodine fortification	600
pneumoADIP	400 - 800
Hospice and palliative care (developing world)	300
Modafinil consumption	300
Vitamin A supplementation	50 - 1,500
Asteroid impact	80 - 600
Diarrhea treatment	200
Political donations	60 - 600
Indoor air pollution	150
Environmental Defense Fund (global warming)	100 - 190
HIV treatment	50 - 150
Nuclear non-proliferation	20 - 300
Water and sanitation	50?
Naive international development NGO	30 - 40
Carbon credit purchase	13 - 25
Flu shot	6 - 15
College scholarships (developed world)	1 - 4
--- Everything above here is worth funding ---
Habitat for Humanity (Greater San Francisco)	0 - 0.8
OneWorld Health	0

We maintain the following cross cutting pages:

Global catastrophic risks - some rough estimates of global catastrophic risks so we know which ones to explore in more detail; more accurate estimates on individual pages
Lobbying and advocacy - a general purpose technique that can be used to magnify the effect of many other interventions.
International development lobbying and advocacy - keeping track of the players in this space.

Aren't some of the reported leverage factors rather large? In computing leverage factors we perform all calculations in rich country terms, and we consider a life equally valuable whether it is that of a person from a poor country or a rich country. This makes our estimates of leverage factors substantially larger than those of the prevailing economic literature which values a life based on its economic output.

Why do we map all returns to a dollar value? Wouldn't it be better to leave them as lives saved, students completing secondary school, amount raised through a microcredit scheme, and so on? This would work for comparisons within domains, but it is important that we also be able to perform comparisons between domains. Is it better to save a life, or have ten students complete secondary school? The natural way to answer this is to map each outcome to a dollar value. Other approaches also assign values to each outcome, but simply keep the dollar value hidden.

How important is tax deductibility? Not very. Given the wide range in charitable effectiveness it is preferable to donate less to a non-deductible charity than donate more to a less effective but deductible charity.

Be aware of the difference between the Leverage Factor for a charity and a charitable opportunity. A charity has administrative overheads and risk of program failures to account for that an idealized charitable opportunity doesn't have. These can be substantial.