Frequently Asked Questions

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Smart Giving promotes thoughtful philanthropy.

We want to take your philanthropy from good to exceptionally great.  With about five minutes of thought, your donated dollar can go many, many times further than it otherwise would.  We want donors to to think not only about the sacrifice that they are making and the recognition they'll receive (and to be clear, we think philanthropy is praiseworthy and recognition is deserved), but to also think about maximizing the effect of each donated dollar.  We want to focus on the donee in addition to the donor.

Our goal is to encourage Georgia's legal community to direct its donated dollars to charities that can accomplish the most good.  Our goals generally align with the effective altruism movement.

Just as some law firms are more effective than their competitors, some charities are more effective than other charities.  In the charity world, the differences may starker because at least all lawyers have to pass the bar exam.

Some charities have chosen great missions, worked hard to figure out how to accomplish those missions, tracked data to assess their performance, and continually sought to improve.  Others are well-intentioned but ineffective or inefficient.  Many charities rely on emotional pleas or social connections, rather than evidence of their effectiveness, to raise money.  Others are tax shelters or are frauds.

We encourage giving to the good ones.

Yep.  In doing so we aren't trying to cast shade upon well-intentioned folks, but you asked the question (well ok, we asked it, but you looked at it), so here are two examples.

(1) Education is important, and donating to educational causes is generally good.  But to take an example from GiveWell, if you focused on education in New York City, it would cost over $100,000 to educate a student through twelve years of school.  Educating young people is laudable, but what else could be done with that money?   You could save about twenty lives, because the most effective charities can save a life for about $5,000.  Either goal is laudable, but we believe one path accomplishes more good than the other.

(2)  The Make-a-Wish foundation grants wishes for children with critical illnesses.  That's a good thing, and far better than spending the money on whiskey or spa treatments.  But could you accomplish more good with your donated dollar?  Here we quote Peter Singer:

 “The average cost of realizing the wish of a child with a life-threatening illness is $7,500. That sum, if donated to the Against Malaria Foundation and used to provide bed nets to families in malaria-prone regions, could save the lives of [one or two] children (and that’s a conservative estimate). If donated to the Fistula Foundation, it could pay for surgeries for approximately 17 young mothers who, without that assistance, will be unable to prevent their bodily wastes from leaking through their vaginas and hence are likely to be outcasts for the rest of their lives. If donated to the Seva Foundation to treat trachoma and other common causes of blindness in developing countries, it could protect 100 children from losing their sight as they grow older.” 

Because your dollar goes further -- and it's not close.

People in the developing world often have serious but basic needs that can be met cheaply.  For example, malaria rarely kills people in the United States because most people have somewhere to sleep at night where mosquitoes can't bite them and, if someone does contract malaria, medical treatment is available.  But in much of the developing world, neither of those things is true, so distributing insecticide-treated nets to sleep under is a practical, cheap, and tested way to save lives.  The Against Malaria Foundation acquires such nets for about $5 each and distributes them where they're needed.  In the developing world, $5 goes a long way.  In the United States, $5 buys about half of a meal at McDonald's.  So if you seek to maximize the benefit of your donated dollar, that usually means giving overseas.

GiveWell has a great, data-backed explanation here.

That may be true, at least in the relative sense.  But it's not what matters.

Philanthropy ought to be about the donee, not the donor.  In other words, we think that we should give in such a way as to do the most good possible, rather than giving in the way that most positively influences our own emotions.  It's true that you're more likely to get a bigger emotional lift, and hear more personal expressions of gratitude, if you donate to people you know and to charities in your neighborhood.  But if your goal is to accomplish as much good as you can, rather than to lift your own emotional state, then effective altruism is probably your answer.

There are different types of giving, of course.  For some people, political giving is a cost of doing business.  Sometimes we donate to friends' favorite causes to create or maintain relationships.  But in our view, effective altruism and smart giving is something else -- it's what we do to make the world a better place.

There's nothing else as good.

GiveWell was started by two financial professionals who left Wall Street to do something more meaningful with their lives.  They brought to the world of charity evaluation a level of rigor that was previously lacking and that remains unmatched.  GiveWell uses real thought and real math.  It assesses, inter alia, the need being addressed, the efficiency with which the charity addresses that need, the willingness of the charity to provide data about their operations, the ability of the charity to efficiently use additional funding, and ongoing monitoring of the charity's back-end effectiveness.

GiveWell is transparent.  For each Top Charity, GiveWell publishes a full research report that explains how it evaluated the charity, what it liked, and what its reservations are.  GiveWell clearly explains its critera, what it evaluates, what it doesn't, and the limitations of its evaluations.  GiveWell publishes and analyzes its own mistakes.

GiveWell is respected.  Charity Navigator, an evaluator that competes with (and in our view, has been effectively replaced by) GiveWell, gives it a charity score of 100%.  Reputable news sources such as the Boston Globe, Washington Post, New York Times, and Wired have endorsed GiveWell.

Legitimate question.  We think lots of people wonder about this but are too polite to ask.  The short answer is that birthrates drop when social structures advance and social structures don't advance until basic needs are met.  So meeting basic needs, which is usually the goal of effective altruism, is beneficial because it saves lives in the short term and leads to declining birthrates in the long term.

Birthrates drop when social structures are advanced.  Overpopulation is a less-acute problem in the developed world because birthrates are lower.  For example, birthrates in the United States, much of Europe, and Japan are well below replacement level, meaning that in the absence of immigration, the populations would decline.  That's because people tend to have fewer children when (1) children are an economic cost (as in the developed countries) rather than an economic benefit (as in agrarian societies where children can help farm), (2) child and infant mortality is lower, and (3) parents are less dependent on children to care for them as they age.  Another predictor of lower birthrates is women's education -- where women are educated, birthrates are lower.

Social structures don't advance until basic needs are met.  Social structures don't develop, and countries don't move from "developing" toward "developed," until adults and parents can pursue specialized careers.  In other words, if parents must focus all of their efforts on subsistence and the survival of their children, they don't develop the specialized skills that lead to societal advancement.  For example, if parents are suffering from malaria, or are caring for relatives or children suffering from malaria or vitamin A deficiency, their ability to work or pursue an education is diminished.  This is particularly true of women, who tend to be primary caretakers and who rarely pursue their own educations if the survival of their children is at state.  So addressing basic needs, such as preventing malaria or providing vitamin A to children, enables parents to work outside the home and pursue the educational goals that make a more developed society -- and therefore a declining birthrate -- possible.

Yes, he was.  Effective altruism is a good idea and SBF was one of many who believed in it, or at least claimed to.  We regret that SBF tarnished the phrase, but effective altruism remains fantastic even if SBF turned out not to be.

We can't help you with that.  But we can put your picture on our website!

Please!  Just email us.