
Ask HN: What charitable organizations do you donate to? - donations-2015
It&#x27;s the end of the year, so I&#x27;m doing my annual charitable donations. Where do others on HN donate? I&#x27;ve got the EFF and the Red Cross on my list.<p>Also, I&#x27;d like to maximize the impact of my money. How do you assess the relative value of different agencies?<p>And, what should I do over the next 12 months to be better prepared next year?
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fantominous
GiveWell [1] does a lot of research to come up with their list of recommended
charities - ones that will have the highest amount of impact for each dollar
donated to them.

A couple times every year I look at their top charity and drop a few hundred
dollars on them. IMO if you want to maximize the impact of your donation, you
can't go wrong with this approach.

[1] [http://www.givewell.org/](http://www.givewell.org/)

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DanBC
They currently recommend "Deworm the world".

They list "Deworm the world" as:

> The Deworm the World Initiative, led by Evidence Action, is one of our top-
> rated charities and an organization that we feel offers donors an
> outstanding opportunity to accomplish good with their donations.

Deworming children who have worms is obviously really important, but there's
some debate around the effectiveness of population level deworming. Partly
this debate is caused by different statistical methods: if you do heath stats
you see less benefit; if you do economist stats you see more benefit. (The
argument started with an attempt to replicate the results by looking at the
data. Using economist stats this works; using health stats it doesn't. The
mass deworming people say that some statistical shenanigans make that an
invalid approach. The epidemiologist's point to missing data from the original
study.)

[http://community.cochrane.org/features/deworming-
debate](http://community.cochrane.org/features/deworming-debate)

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33972806](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33972806)

This is for one of their best, most recommendable, charities. It doesn't
inspire confidence in the GiveWell methods or recommendations.

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NkWsy
archive.org

