Charitable Donations

AKA, "Vote on how Blue Ninja is wasting his money!"

For those who don't know*

, every year, usually in the fall, there comes around the Combined Federal Campaign to all of us poor schlubs who maintain freedom and bureaucracy around the world. The CFC is a magazine-sized booklet with a paragraph or so for several hundred different charities, organized by category.

I am going to be listing the charities I plan to donate to, and the amount per month for each one. This thread is for discussing the merits of charitible donations, or for the suggestion of similar charities who do similar activities. It is not for bad-mouthing any of the organizations listed. No derails into animal rights, abortions, civil rights, or zero-population growth*

, or any other topic.

My choices are thus:

• Big Cat Rescue Corp ($1/month) cause
  ^{They are helping rescue large cats abused for things like pets for rich people, bred for their pelts or alchemical ingredients. I like cats.}
• Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation ($1/month) cause
  ^{They fund providing musical instruments to disadvantaged youth. I used to play violin and viola and while I was lucky enough to have my own inherited instrument, not everyone is that fortunate.}
• SETI Institute ($1/month) cause
  ^{They look for aliens. What's not cool about that? This is the one I am least attached to.}
• Planned Parenthood ($2/month) cause
  ^{If anyone asks what Planned Parenthood does, I am smacking them in the face with a trout. Unless you're going to recommend me another charity that also provides contraception, STD testing, and family planning, leave this one alone.}
• ACLU ($1/month) cause
  ^{For all that the ACLU is (often rightly) accused of doing frivolous lawsuits, they also represent many cases where injustice has been done and the plaintiff/defendant cannot afford their own legal council.}
• Snow Leopard Trust ($1/month) cause
  ^{Yes, another big cat rescue. Snow Leopards and Ocelots are probably my two favorite big cats, and while I can't find any specific charity for the second, I donated to this charity last year and plan to continue.}

In comparison, last year's donations from me totalled $5/month, so I'm bumping it up a little bit. If there are any other favorite charities that people feel the need to convince me to donate to, go ahead. This is the first year I'm not donating to a gay/lesbian rights organization, partly thanks to the recent successes they've had*

and therefore have some momemtum on their side. Please feel free to share your own choices for charities.

edited 20th Sep '11 3:26:53 PM by BlueNinja0

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

Alright, this is an important one.

The thing about charities is, it should be about how much good your dollar is doing. In the end, what matters is the results produced by your donation- what happens as a result of the money you donate.

If, by donating $500 you could save a life, is that a better use of money than donating $5000 to save a life? Or to put it another way, is it better to save 10 lives with $5000, or 1? The answer should be obvious.

With that in mind, there's been a lot of research done on the most efficient charities. For around $200-$1000, you can save a life by buying a malaria net, or providing child immunizations. Is that a better use of funds than other charities? Dunno, that's up to you.

There's nothing wrong with donating to other charities, but it is good to consider which charity does the most good and focusing your actual assistance charity there.

Someone else explains it better.

I hope this doesn't discourage you or anyone else from donating. Just something to consider when you donate.

I'd recommend Against Malaria Foundation and/or some microfinance companies (make sure to pick a highly investigated/open one).

edited 20th Sep '11 4:36:38 PM by deathjavu

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

Is there an online version of that pamphlet so us poor schlubs who don't know or aren't american, but do care can help?

Pamphlets for?

Not sure who or what that question is about.

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

So, other than your personal preference for what matters to you... you could give more detail as to the administrative overhead of each charity you are giving to and the average overhead of the category that charity is in.

I meant the booklet*

mentioned in the OP. I'd love to help and/or privately laugh at the absurd ones, but beyond the Red Cross, I don't know charities.

I usually prefer UNICEF operations, they have low overhead. WFP is also pretty low overhead. Actually most of the UN operations are run far better than private charities.

E: question answered. Should Refresh page before posting.

edited 21st Sep '11 12:33:12 PM by Qeise

Laws are made to be broken. You're next, thermodynamics.

I always find that there are otherwise-decent organizations I like that agree with me on a majority of the issues they focus on, and then there will be that one thing that makes me disdain them anyways and invalidates everything else they do.

Amnesty International and Planned Parenthood are the two that come to mind immediately.

Anyhow, recommended charities... hm... ASPCA? I think that's the acronym. Anyhow, yeah, they have a good reputation, if I recall correctly, and they're all about the welfare and good treatment of animals within reasonable (i.e. not stupid PETA/ALF levels) limits.

edited 21st Sep '11 2:41:04 PM by USAF713

I am now known as Flyboy.

For those who asked - the website*

is http://www.cfcnps.org/ It is in PDF format, and should be searchable.

All the charities in the book have ratings for how much of their money goes to administration, advertising, and salaries; I look pretty closely at that, and I don't think I picked any charity with over a 20% rating.

USAF: My understanding was that the ASPCA was more for protecting/preventing pet cruelty, not protecting rare/endangered species.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

Yes. You'd still be helping those precious cats, though.

I am now known as Flyboy.

This is entirely the wrong metric for measuring charities. A charity that saves 10 lives with $10,000 and a 50% overhead, is obviously inferior to a charity that saves 1 life with $10,000 and no overhead. Charities should be about RESULTS.

Granted, the first charity should lower their overhead if they can. But it's still better than the first charity, assuming you care about saving lives.

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

That only presumes I don't also measure other metrics. You don't have to use only one metric afterall. He's just using zero metrics and I can't really base an opinion on whether he should favour those charities over others if all it's based on is "I like dogs, I'll donate to a dog-specific charity".

I'm asserting that the end results of charities are what matter, not how they get there.

That doesn't seem like a controversial assertion to me. What the hell else are charities about? Making donaters' feel good? Feeding donaters' egos? Tax write-offs?

Look, measure a charity by results, not how efficiently they get there. If one company does 10 times as much with the same money, but has half of it in overhead, that is better than a charity that achieves 1/10 the result without any overhead.

Dog shelter. Build 10 with 50% overhead to employees, or 1 with no overhead to employees (assuming they all have the same capacity)? The answer is obvious to anyone with a brain.

edited 22nd Sep '11 12:50:07 PM by deathjavu

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

Yes? :)

If we had a third party agency that could measure result and success in a concise manner (like say we tasked Statistics Canada to determine the result-per-dollar of Canadian charities), then I would be happy to check that out. Right now, all we have are metrics for overhead. I could say my mosquito nets saved 100000 people, there's no actual way to prove it.

Wrong and wrong.

Givewell has some problems, namely that they're unsure if their research is worth the money they spend on it or if it would be better just to donate that money, but the more people that use their research the more effective it becomes.

Your complaint about lack of results research was one echoed earlier by Bill Gates, it seems.

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

It looks like the money they spend on the research is well worth it. Barely 2% of the charities are recommended.

EDIT: At first, I was going to go, oh I guess they ARE studying the issue and I was wrong. But the problem still stands. All they do is use published numbers on charity websites for their study. Then this place is hard to navigate but it looks like they've basically established that there are a set of activities that are "proven to work" (which isn't unreasonable) and thus require a charity to commit at least 75% of the budget to such activities to be considered on the list (which becomes questionable, I mean doesn't that run into your whole... "even if they waste half their money" argument?).

It also looks like it's only checking out health-related stuff. Which means they'll rank something like UNICEF super low, when health-related aid is only one part of UNICEF (thus it'd never be able to meet the 75% mark for the "priority" programs).

I'd like for givewell to segregate the results into different sections and also a way to search. All i got is this top 5 list of charities it likes and at first I was trying to look for other charities when I realised that, the list was so small because it was only thinking about disease prevention.

I was under the impression you were talking about how much a charity helps people versus cost, not how much they do per dollar (which is what I meant by overhead costs). As in, you don't care if it costs 5 dollars per vaccine they administer or 15 dollars, you care that the way and what they administer saves more lives. Those are results that are still not available.

edited 22nd Sep '11 2:25:34 PM by breadloaf

They have some pretty extensive stuff.

Chacha.

See? They have exactly what you're asking for.

edited 22nd Sep '11 2:26:08 PM by deathjavu

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

I was under the impression you were talking about how much a charity helps people versus cost, not how much they do per dollar (which is what I meant by overhead costs). As in, you don't care if it costs 5 dollars per vaccine they administer or 15 dollars, you care that the way and what they administer saves more lives. Those are results that are still not available.

You're not reading the research, are you?

For instance, they check on disease incidence before and after the programs and consider various factors possibly involved in those changes.

The reasearch page for each charity is actually really, really long. I don't blame you for not reading all of it, but it's there.

edited 22nd Sep '11 2:28:21 PM by deathjavu

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

I am actually, I'm reading their top charity Village Reach. It's not really that long. And that's the problem I have with these discussions of "results" is that it's nearly impossible to figure anything out. They have a lot of circumstantial evidence and they have statistical correlations here and there, so I would like to believe that to be true. Their executive summary appears to state "under $1000 per child saved" ($400-$800 per kid). The main thing problematic about the research is that Village Reach wasn't the only thing happening in the region. They went in at the same time as a bunch of other aid programs and economic development. But vaccinations are easier to measure.

Of course, all this discussion doesn't really help Blue Ninja, since his donations to charities don't include anything in givewell.org nor does givewell.org focus on specific result-costs be capable of measuring more nebulous stuff like scientific research.

Also, this is kinda why I favour state-sponsored solutions to these types of problems. We're wasting a lot of time researching this stuff and doing it very unscientifically. Give to the state, if the state does it inefficiently, lobby them to improve their methods.

EDIT:

Okay so I have three metric ideas coming out of this discussion:

• Administrative efficiency (more money going to programs rather than non-programs)
• Cost effectiveness of the programs (if they're handing out vaccines, what is cost per vaccine? If they're building homes for homeless, what is the cost of each homeless person given a home?)
• Quality of program (if you gave a homeless guy a home, does he ever move up in life later and get a job? If you're providing disease prevention does the rate lower in a statistically significant way?)

And then have all these state-run and the numbers public on the internet. The stats are collected by the stat agency, not the aid department.

edited 22nd Sep '11 2:46:00 PM by breadloaf