Full details of our research process

Our current top charities represent charities that we can confidently recommend to individual, casual (i.e., non-professional, non-expert) donors. They are characterized by the following qualities:

• Strong evidence of positive impact on people's lives. More on this criterion here.
• Highly cost-effective activities. We seek charities that provide high "bang for the buck," in terms of changing many lives (significantly) for relatively little money. Available cost-effectiveness estimates involve a great deal of uncertainty and approximation; we place limited weight on estimated cost-effectiveness, but we are mindful of extremely large differences. More on this criterion here.
• Room for more funding. It isn't enough to identify a strong program; we seek to identify strong programs that can productively use more donor funding. More on this criterion here.
  
• Transparency and accountability to donors. Recommended charities must be willing to share enough in-depth information about their work that we can assess them on the above criteria.

Consistent with our mission of trying to identify outstanding giving opportunities, we are open to any organization that can make a compelling case for impact and we would not exclude any organization just because it did not meet one of these criteria. We are currently exploring what sort of giving opportunities we can find when we relax these criteria significantly; nonetheless, the best giving opportunties we've found for individual donors to date fit these criteria.