The British public love to give to charity. From big BBC-led television extravaganzas like Children in Need, Sports Relief and Comic Relief to your everyday person raising money after the death of a relative, we as a nation seem to relish giving. It's an undervalued national character trait, if you ask me.
What we don't do, though, when deciding to donate to third-world-relief charities, is to take time to consider which charities have the best cost to result ratio. It's the big names charities that take in the majority of our dough, the charities with a broad scope. That's not a slight: it's difficult and tedious to do because there are so many charities seeking to make a difference. It's a shame there is less awareness of the differing potential for change across charities because it makes a massive difference. According to the excellent givingwhatwecan.org "it is not even a matter of some charities being 10 or 100 times as effective: even restricted to the field of health programs in developing countries, research shows that some are up to 10,000 times as effective as others." Damn. So what they're saying is that for every live you improve giving to a less effective charity you could be improving ten thousand lives.
Giving What We Can is an organisation in which all members have taken a pledge to give 10% of their earnings to the most efficient charities. It sort of feels like a group of super-philanthropists with a dauntingly noble dedication to making a difference. However, if you're put off by the scarily large 10% figure, like I have been, they also speak an enormous amount of sense on giving efficiently and effectively. Even if you just give what you feel comfortable with, knowing which charities do the best work will enhance the value of the sum many times. If I were to go further on the best charities and so on I would just be quoting the website, so for convenience have a big juicy link instead.
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