Primers for charity evaluation?

By James-Hartree-Law @ 2025-07-24T22:33 (+13)

Asking for reccomended readings to learn about the methods of charity evaluation. 

Is there a well developed methodology? A unified method?

Also interested to talk to people about charity evaluation. 

I am trying to figure out how Christians can be reached in terms of eval, especially because EA messaging really isn't landing too well in my conversations with Christians. 

I think it is important because 1) 80% of churchgoers give to non-profits on top of tithing, 2) Christian giving is highly centralised, 3) Christians are underexposed to effectiveness considerations, 4) I estimate USA churches spend $13B on charity efforts. 

David_Moss @ 2025-07-25T09:55 (+4)

I am trying to figure out how Christians can be reached in terms of eval, especially because EA messaging really isn't landing too well in my conversations with Christians. 


This sounds like a question that might benefit from testing how Christians (though, of course, this is a heterogeneous group) respond to different messages about charity or about evaluation specifically.

I would also add that I think that a lot of what is distinctive about EA is not to do with charity evaluation specifically, but to do with wanting to maximize impartially. Many, many groups want to know whether their charities of interest are pursuing their (narrow) goals effectively. Many fewer want to know whether their favoured narrow goals (e.g. help the whales, help some specific village) is impartially helping (considered across all domains) to the greatest extent possible.

James-Hartree-Law @ 2025-07-25T18:01 (+1)

I'm very interested to learn more about testing. This would be especially important when I am at the stage of reaching churches and Christian businesses to offer auditing based on charity evaluations. First I need to develop a framework for evals. 

This is a helpful insight about effectiveness vs. cause prioritisation. Especially in Christian circles (anecdotally) there's a high amount of resistance to drop an existing effort for a more important one. 

Toby Tremlett🔹 @ 2025-07-25T10:01 (+2)

Has anyone written a blog post on this called "The Problem of Eval" because there's some real alpha there. 

Luke Moore 🔸 @ 2025-07-25T09:12 (+1)

Might be worth looking at GWWC's evaluators research to get an overview of our thinking about some of this. Not exactly what you're looking for, but might be helpful. 

James-Hartree-Law @ 2025-07-25T18:03 (+1)

Thankyou! Can you suggest anyone that I could talk to at GWCC who works on evaluating evaluators? I would imagine someone like this would have a lot to say about the best methodologies.