Charity Evaluation - How does it work?

The Life You Can Save is a book written in 2009 by the philosopher and philanthropist Peter Singer. It is perhaps the foundational text of effective giving. You may have heard of the drowning child thought experiment, in which you are asked to consider whether you would be willing to get your shoes and suit wet in order to rescue a drowning toddler on your way to work. Once you answer in the affirmative, as we all do, Peter Singer asks us why we do not apply similar reasoning to children in developing countries, where millions of children die every day from preventable causes. The effective giving movement is based on the principle that we should care as much about these unseen children as we do about the toddler we can actually see drowning in front of us.

The Life You Can Save is also one of the world's foremost effective giving organisations, based in Australia but with global reach, which was co-founded by Charlie Bresler and Peter Singer in 2013. We strongly encourage anyone interested in effective giving, or in charity in general, to browse through the great material on their website and to consider supporting their work.

Recently, they ran a webinar with other effective giving organisations like ours about their Charity Evaluation methodology. We at Effective Giving Ireland, being a small, volunteer-run organisation, do not have the resources to do our own evaluations, although during our incubation we did run trial charity evaluations ourselves just to learn how they work. But normally we defer to the excellent work done by partners like Giving What We Can, Givewell and The Live You Can Save.

So we thought it would be very interesting for potential donors to see how this process works, how transparent everything is and how high the standards are to meet the "effective" bar. Watch a recording of the Webinar, and let us know if you have any thoughts or questions in the comments.