Giving to others: How to convert your money into greater happiness for others

Key insights

• The cost-effectiveness of charities can be measured and compared with a standardised metric of value: wellbeing-years (WELLBYs).
• In the first global review of published evidence, we find that the cost-effectiveness of charities varies dramatically. The best charities in our sample are hundreds of times better at increasing happiness per dollar than others. Therefore, you can multiply your impact at no extra cost by funding more cost-effective charities.
• There are no published evaluations of large, well-known charities or typical acts of charitable giving, such as helping the homeless, using a wellbeing approach. We present some rough evaluations of these cases but find them to be less cost-effective than nearly all the charities in our sample.

Introduction

We hope that if you’re reading this, you’re not just interested in world happiness, you want to do something about it. But, what can you do? This chapter focuses on something many of us already do and nearly all of us can do: give to charity. Each year, over a billion people donate more than $500 billion to charity,^[1] driven in large part by a desire to help others.^[2]

However, there are many worthy problems in the world, our resources are limited, and we don’t want to waste our money. So, how can you get real change for your dollar? More specifically, how can you make the biggest difference to world happiness with what you have to spare?

People say “money can’t buy happiness”. At the Happier Lives Institute, we reject that claim but with a twist. We show that money can buy happiness for other people and we highlight the ‘best buys’ that have been identified so far. To do this, we compare the impact of charities using wellbeing-years (WELLBYs) per dollar, a method we will explain in due course.

In the first global review of published evidence, we find the best charities are hundreds of times better than others. This means you have an opportunity to make a far greater difference to world happiness, at no extra cost to yourself, simply by changing where you donate. If a friend told you they gave $200,000 to a charity, you’d probably be extremely impressed – that could be their life savings! However, it’s possible to have that sort of impact for a fraction of the cost: giving $1,000 to the best charities may do just as much good as $200,000 to a randomly selected one.

You may be familiar with the claim – widely made in the effective altruism movement^[3] and endorsed in a survey of charity experts^[4] – that the top charities are a hundred times more impactful than the average charity. While this claim is believable, we are unaware of any research that demonstrates, or even tests this, with evidence. Indeed, we cannot think of any attempts to assess the cost-effectiveness of a representative sample of charities – a necessary first step for comparing ‘the average’ to ‘the best’. The most relevant work we know of finds that health interventions can differ dramatically in cost-effectiveness (when measured with a standard health metric).^[5] This suggests, but doesn’t demonstrate, that the same may be true for charities. Our analysis provides the most direct test (we know of) for the claim that the best charities can be a hundred times more cost-effective than others.

We begin the chapter by introducing some key ideas behind our empirical comparison of charities. This includes brief discussions of effective giving, the focus on wellbeing, the WELLBY, and assessing charity cost-effectiveness.

We then turn to the main part of the chapter: a global comparison of charity cost-effectiveness. Scientific research into happiness has been growing for decades. In recent years, around 4,000 papers are published annually on the topic^[6] and at least 37 countries now measure subjective wellbeing routinely.^[7] However, efforts to find the most cost-effective ways to improve happiness are only getting started. A handful of WELLBYs per dollar estimates for charities and policies have been produced in the last 10 years. We found 24 estimates of different charities from four different evaluators. While this is neither a large nor representative sample of evaluations, it does cover a variety of charitable activities across the world. Our emphasis is on the variability in cost-effectiveness and the ability of research to reveal this, rather than the specific ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. Given the newness of this field, we want to spark interest from donors and researchers, not draw definite conclusions.

This sample of pre-existing estimates has two key gaps: it doesn’t include any of the biggest and most well-known NGOs or any typical acts of charity, such as helping the homeless. How do these two options compare to the charities in our sample? We explain why it’s hard to estimate the cost-effectiveness of many charities using WELLBYs, particularly for Multi-Armed NGOs (MANGOs) that run many programmes. We attempt to partially fill the gap by providing back-of-the-envelope calculations for a couple of well-known NGOs and for helping the homeless in wealthy countries. Our tentative conclusion is that the top charities in our sample are likely to be considerably more impactful per dollar than the missing options.

In the final parts of the chapter, we anticipate questions and objections and set out directions for further work.

Effective giving: a wellbeing approach

We expect many readers of the World Happiness Report will like the idea of finding and supporting the charities that make the most difference, per dollar, to world happiness. But, we don’t want to assume readers have thought about why and how to do this. Before we get to the empirical analysis, we motivate and explain the project. For ease of reading, we have split up the various ideas. Readers familiar with these should feel free to skip over them.

Why give at all

The classic argument for giving to charity comes from the philosopher Peter Singer. He asks us to imagine we are walking past a shallow pond when we suddenly see that a child is drowning.^[8] We can jump in and save that child, but this will ruin our expensive new suit. Are we morally required to save the child at some cost to ourselves? The reaction most people have is that we must wade in. The principle that appears to explain this reaction is that, as Singer puts it, “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable importance, we ought, morally, to do it”.^[9]

This dilemma is not merely theoretical. People are suffering all around the world. Even if we can’t help them directly, we could give some share of our income – perhaps 1% – to charities that can. This may not feel the same as doing it ourselves when the person is right in front of us, but the outcome may be identical. It seems that, if we have a moral duty to rescue the child, we have a moral duty to give something to charity.^[10]

You may not feel wealthy enough to give, but you’re probably wealthier than you think. If you earn the median United States (US) salary ($42k), you are in the top 2% of the global income distribution.^[11] What’s more, humans have existed for a few hundred thousand years and the world has never been wealthier.^[12] Believe it or not, you may be one of the richest people who has ever lived.

That’s the stern, ‘bad cop’ argument for giving, but we can offer a ‘good cop’ one too: altruism is its own reward. Research shows that prosocial behaviour – and charitable giving in particular – improve self-reported wellbeing.^[13] This is no surprise if you’ve ever felt the warm glow of giving a gift to family or showing kindness to a stranger. Other chapters in this edition of the World Happiness Report also show the importance of prosocial behaviour. Chapter 2 highlights how having a clear sense of one’s positive impact increases its reward to wellbeing. This chapter will give you clear information about how impactful your charitable donations can be. If you are not sure if giving will make you happier, why not try it and find out?

Why to give effectively

This chapter will be most useful for those who want to give effectively i.e., to make the biggest (or at least, a bigger) difference with their donations based on evidence.

The argument for effective giving is simple: if you can make a bigger difference to others without a significant extra cost to yourself, you should do so. As we’ve already said and later show, this is not merely hypothetical: some charities are much more impactful than others, in terms of the happiness they create per dollar.

Not everyone is, or wants to be, an ‘effective giver’.^[14] Research has found that people are not effective givers due to: (A) information, they don’t know how or where to give effectively, and (B) motivation, they prefer to support causes they are attached to, even if this would have less impact.^[15]

At first glance, it’s understandable that few donors seek information on charity cost-effectiveness. According to recent research, donors predict that the best charities helping the global poor are only 1.5 times better than the average ones.^[16] If you believe that charities don’t differ much by cost-effectiveness, it doesn’t make sense to invest time looking for a slightly better option. However, the evidence in this chapter shows that this belief is misplaced.

Research has also found that people focus too much on overheads (i.e., non-programme expenses like office costs and management salaries) and mistakenly think that charities with higher overheads must be less cost-effective.^[17] When donors realise that overheads and cost-effectiveness can diverge, they give more to charities with higher cost-effectiveness. To make this point, consider a hypothetical charity, Donuts for Billionaires, which uses volunteers and spends 100% of its money on snacks for the world’s wealthiest people: no overheads, but not cost-effective. All the estimates we present in this chapter integrate the overheads when calculating cost-effectiveness.

Regarding motivation, it’s understandable that people want to support projects close to their hearts – particularly if you think all charities are about as cost-effective as each other, or it’s hard to compare them. Someone might want to support a charity that works on a particular health condition because a family member suffers from it. If this sounds like you, ask yourself this: do you care about that specific health problem, or do you care about it because of the impact it has, for instance the suffering it causes? If your ultimate goal is to have an impact, you may want to choose another charity that is better at achieving that objective.

People say that charity “begins at home”, but we don’t think it should end there. We may feel a greater bond with those who are close to us, but we may want to look beyond that if we can make a much bigger difference to those further away. We encourage readers to consider the global impact they could have.

Finally, the choice between giving to what makes you feel good and what does the most good doesn’t have to be all or nothing. A middle option here is to split your donations, something we return to in the section on objections.

Assessing charity impact on wellbeing

Our analysis defines ‘impact’ in terms of changes to overall wellbeing. More conventional approaches might focus on poverty or health. However, we don’t believe that improving poverty or health is the ultimate goal. Rather, the ultimate goal is to help people live happier lives. We should think of health and wealth as means to an end: the end being happiness.^[18] Here’s a test. If you gave to charity and it had no impact on anyone’s happiness, nor reduced any suffering, would you be disappointed? If you would, that suggests you believe happiness is what ultimately matters.

Quantifying charity impact in WELLBYs

We quantify impact using wellbeing-years (WELLBYs).^[19] One WELLBY is equivalent to a 1-point increase on a 0–10 self-reported wellbeing scale (typically life satisfaction) for 1 person for 1 year. So, if your wellbeing went from 6/10 to 7/10 for two years, that would be a gain of 2 WELLBYs.

Data from self-reported wellbeing questions, such as life satisfaction, are increasingly common^[20] and widely viewed as meaningful.^[21] The World Happiness Report uses a life evaluation question for its global ranking of countries. One of the main benefits of using self-reported wellbeing is that we can see, from the data, how much things like wealth and health really matter to people’s lives, rather than assuming we know.

How significant is a 1-point change in life satisfaction? In high-income countries, being depressed is associated with a 1.3-point decrease in life satisfaction,^[22] being unemployed is about a 0.5-point decrease,^[23] a doubling of income is about a 0.2-point increase,^[24] and marriage is associated with a 0.3-point increase a year after getting married.^[25]

Quantifying impact in WELLBYs is a recent research area. It’s a simple and powerful approach and we are not the only people to propose or use it. The WELLBY was proposed as an alternative or complement to measures of health and wealth in World Happiness Report 2021,^[26] and has been discussed in mainstream academia as a method for evaluating public policy.^[27] In 2021, the WELLBY methodology was adopted by the United Kingdom (UK) Treasury as an official way of evaluating the impact of government policies.^[28]

We see no good reason not to apply WELLBYs to charities: it gives us a scientifically credible, evidence-based way to work out how much good we do, per dollar, by giving to different charities. So, how can we assess charity impact in WELLBYs, and what’s been found so far?

A review of the current literature

In this section, we discuss and compare the previous work that has analysed the cost-effectiveness of life-improving charities in WELLBYs. We offer some context first before presenting a table of the results and a few case studies to illustrate how the evaluations were done. Finally, we present a figure indicating the differences in cost-effectiveness and discuss how to interpret these results.

Context for WELLBY charity evaluation

Evaluations of charity cost-effectiveness in WELLBYs only started in the last few years. The first ones we know of were in Plant (2019) and the first explicitly couched in WELLBYs were all published in 2021: by Frijters and Krekel, State of Life, and the Happier Lives Institute (where the authors work).^[29]

At the time of writing, we found 24 charity evaluations from four evaluators:^[30]

• State of Life: 3 charities
• Pro Bono Economics: 3 charities
• Happier Lives Institute: 14 charities
• Krekel and colleagues: 4 charities

The first three are organisations. (Christian) Krekel is an academic who has produced estimates with different colleagues so, for simplicity, we say “Krekel and colleagues”.^[31]

At its simplest, a charity evaluation might look at the total amount an organisation spends to provide a service, how many people it provides that service to, and then estimate the average benefit per person reached. So, if a charity spent $1 million, reached 50,000 people, and they each got a 1 WELLBY benefit, that’s 50,000 WELLBYs for $1 million, a cost-effectiveness of $1 million / 50,000 = $20 per WELLBY.

Getting sensible estimates for these numbers can be a resource-intensive process. The charity evaluations we draw on usually consist of a technical report at least as long as this chapter. We summarise each evaluation in a few paragraphs in the online appendix. For brevity and readability, we do not describe every charity evaluation in the main text.

All the evaluations produce a similar output: a cost-per-WELLBY figure for each charity (or estimates easily convertible to these terms). However, they differ in terms of their inputs: the evaluations are not all done in the same way. The main differences are:

1. The depth of the analyses and the quality and quantity of the evidence used.^[32]

2. Modelling choices, such as adjusting for internal and external validity, and whether researchers tried to include longer-term and societal effects in addition to the short-term impacts on the direct beneficiaries.^[33]

For cost-effectiveness estimates to be credible, they need good data and analysis. If we want perfect data and analysis, we will be waiting forever. The estimates we present below are informed by data, not ‘facts’, and we hope further work will refine them. Nevertheless, as the alternative to explicit, quantitative estimates is to rely on intuitive judgments, we see real value in producing and using estimates for decision-making purposes.

We take the evaluators’ assessments at face value, rather than critiquing or adjusting them. Further work could attempt to ‘harmonise’ the estimates, but this wasn’t essential to draw our main conclusion that cost-effectiveness differs radically between charities.^[34] We do, however, include our subjective assessments of the relevance of the evidence and depth of analysis: these can be understood as indicating uncertainty. These estimates will also need to be updated in the future. They reflect the charities’ programmes at a particular point in time and will naturally become less realistic as programmes and operating conditions change.

The charity evaluations

With those caveats out of the way, we present our results. In Table 8.1 we summarise the 24 evaluations (including unpublished ones) we have collected for this chapter. The columns are largely self-explanatory, but we provide further details for interested readers in an endnote.^[35]

In the following sections, we highlight one analysis from each evaluator for illustrative purposes. A longer description of each charity and its evaluation is provided in the online appendix. Some readers may want to skip over these details to see the visual comparisons of cost-effectiveness in the figures below – and return here afterwards.

Psychotherapy in Sub-Saharan Africa (Happier Lives Institute)

StrongMinds^[36] (in Uganda and Zambia) and Friendship Bench^[37] (in Zimbabwe) are two charities scaling access to basic mental healthcare in Sub-Saharan Africa using lay practitioners to deliver psychotherapy to people with depression or anxiety.^[38]

To estimate the effect of these charities we combined evidence from several sources. For the effect on the direct recipient, we drew on three types of evidence.

• First, we performed a systematic search and collected 84 randomised control trials (RCTs) of psychotherapy delivered in low- and middle-income countries.
• Second, we used RCTs associated with the charities’ programmes (1 for StrongMinds and 4 for Friendship Bench).
• Third, we used the monitoring and evaluation pre-post data collected by the charities themselves.

We then combined the estimates from these different evidence sources based on our judgement of the relative statistical uncertainty, quality, and relevance of each estimate. To estimate the effect on other members of the household, we combined data from six studies^[39] and adjusted them for validity concerns (e.g., adjustments for publication bias^[40]).

Based on these evidence sources and our methodology, we estimated an overall effect of 0.80 WELLBYs for Friendship Bench and 1.80 WELLBYs for StrongMinds per person treated (including the effects over time and the impact on the beneficiary’s household). The cost of these programmes is very low as they work in low-income countries and use trained volunteers. The cost to treat an individual for therapy is $17 through Friendship Bench and $45 for StrongMinds. This results in a cost per WELLBY of $21 for Friendship Bench and $25 for StrongMinds. We consider this an in-depth analysis.

Parkrun (State of Life)

Parkrun^[41] is a UK charity that supports free community runs delivered by volunteers every weekend. State of Life estimates its effects using correlational evidence.^[42] First, they use a larger, but less relevant, dataset from the UK (n = 60,000) that shows the relationship between running, volunteering, and wellbeing more broadly. Second, they use a longitudinal study that followed participants before and after they participated in a Parkrun event in the UK (n = 576).

They apply these effects to the total number of walks or runs (8,590,393) and volunteering for Parkrun instances (974,255) in 2019 (see their Table 8 and Approach 3). They then discount the effects in both cases to account for the fact they are missing a randomly assigned control group and so can’t be sure how much of the correlation is due to the effect of related activities.

They did not provide a central estimate between the two estimates, so we took the liberty of averaging them together. The result is Parkrun producing 27,651 WELLBYs in 2019. The total operational cost of Parkrun in 2019 was £4.5 million, resulting in a cost per WELLBY of £165 ($206).^[43] We consider this analysis to be of medium depth.

Action for Happiness (Frijters and Krekel)

Action for Happiness^[44] is a charity that delivers courses and promotes wellbeing skills. The analysis^[45] is based on a randomised control trial which found that a six-week course teaching wellbeing skills raised life satisfaction by around 1 point on a 0-10 scale at the two-month follow-up.

To get the total effects over time the authors assumed the effects remained constant for a year before dropping off completely. They used the course data that suggests it costs £80 per participant and assumed these costs and randomised control trial results are representative of the charity in general. Overall, Action for Happiness has a cost per WELLBY of £80 (or $100).^[46]

We consider this to be a shallow analysis. Note that Action for Happiness has since switched from an in-person to a virtual model, meaning the evidence is now less relevant to the delivery in practice. We are uncertain how this would change its cost-effectiveness.

Football Beyond Borders (Pro Bono Economics)

Football Beyond Borders^[47] is a UK charity dedicated to improving school outcomes for students through a combination of tutoring with a trusted adult, football practice, and therapeutic support. Their cost-effectiveness was evaluated by Pro Bono Economics.^[48]

The study was not a randomised control trial, but they used a matched control method and a difference-in-difference estimator, which is better than relying on pre-post changes. 153 Football Beyond Borders participants were statistically matched with individuals drawn from the Manchester BeeWell dataset. They found that participants’ wellbeing improved by 0.15 points on a 0–10 life-satisfaction scale^[49] and assumed the effects lasted for one year.

During the 2022–23 school year, 2,401 students benefited from the Football Beyond Borders programme, representing a 360 WELLBY benefit. It cost £2.5 million to run the programme. This results in a cost of £6,953 ($8,691)^[50] per WELLBY. We consider this a medium-depth analysis.

Results and interpretation

Distribution of cost-effectiveness

In Figure 8.1, we present the cost-effectiveness estimates for 19 of the 24 analyses.^[51] We identify the different evaluators with unique colours and indicate the depth of analysis with different circle sizes. We use report length as a proxy for depth: in-depth evaluations have multiple analyses that could each be a separate report, medium-depth evaluations have a standalone report, and shallow evaluations are rough, brief analyses that are not presented in standalone reports.

We do not include confidence intervals around the central estimate – which is a typical way of representing uncertainty – for reasons explained in an endnote.^[52]

The figure shows that the cost-effectiveness of the charities varies substantially from $9 to $8,691 per WELLBY – a 942 fold difference in cost-effectiveness. In Figure 8.2, we present the same results, but this time in WELLBYs per $1,000, rather than cost per WELLBY. This is the same information, presented differently. The advantage of showing WELLBYs per $1,000 is that it does not compress the top options in the way cost per WELLBY did above. This presentation shows how much more cost-effective the top options are compared to the middle and bottom ones.

Explaining the distribution

These estimates show that charities differ radically in how much happiness they create per dollar. Why is this? The natural explanation is that the top charities are providing cheap and impactful interventions in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In contrast, the less cost-effective charities are working in high-income countries in ways that are much more expensive.

This difference is starkly presented in Figure 8.3. The top five charities in our sample^[53] all operate in LMICs and have an average cost per WELLBY of $18. This is 142 times more cost-effective than the seven UK charities in our sample^[54] which have an average cost per WELLBY of $2,553.^[55] However, those seven charities are still cost-effective in the UK context, where governmental guidelines value 1 WELLBY at £13,000.^[56]

That said, could the differences in cost-effectiveness be due to some evaluators being more conservative or generous in their analysis than others? At first glance, this may seem like an important factor since the differences in average cost-effectiveness across evaluators are also substantial (see Figure 8.4).

There are differences in methodology that may explain some of the variation we see between evaluators. We discuss these in more detail in the online appendix but highlight the more important points below.

1. Only a few evaluations have been done per evaluator: four or less for State of Life, Pro Bono Economics, and Krekel and colleagues, and just over 10 for the Happier Lives Institute (HLI). As these are such small samples, a single charity evaluation can have a large impact on the average.
2. The evaluators have different sampling processes. State of Life, Pro Bono Economics, and Krekel and colleagues are, to a large extent, analysing UK charities that they were asked to analyse or which were convenient to analyse. In contrast, HLI explicitly set out to look for the most cost-effective charities and focuses on charities working in low-income countries.

It seems reasonable to assume each evaluator is using similar levels of conservatism over time. The main result – charity cost-effectiveness differs substantially – is true even if we look within each evaluator. For the Happier Lives Institute, the best charity is 14x more cost-effective than the least cost-effective charity; for State of Life it’s 13x; for Krekel and colleagues it’s 44x; and for Pro Bono Economics it’s 5x. If charity cost-effectiveness differs considerably within each evaluator, it is unsurprising that cost-effectiveness differs considerably between evaluators with different sampling methods.

A final reason to be reassured comes from analogous WELLBY analyses for policies which also find that the cost-effectiveness of policy initiatives varies to a large degree – even more so than the charities discussed here.^[57] On the low end, some policies, such as government-funded psychotherapy in the UK, are estimated to have a negative cost per WELLBY as they save the government money.^[58] On the higher end, some policies appear highly ineffective. For example, extending the winter fuel allowance in the UK to help older people cover heating costs (a policy the Labour party ended while we were writing this) is estimated to cost $100,000 per WELLBY.

In summary, we find that charities differ substantially in their impact per dollar, with some hundreds of times better than others. This finding is in sharp contrast to the seemingly common but mistaken belief that the best charities are less than two times better than average charities.^[59]

What’s missing from the sample?

Our review has two obvious gaps. First, it doesn’t include any large and well-known NGOs, such as Oxfam or Save the Children. Second, it doesn’t include typical acts of charity, like giving to the homeless within one’s own country. How do these compare to the charities in our sample? In this section, we try to answer that question but we’re unable to draw strong conclusions and more work is needed.

Multi-armed NGOS

The immediate challenge with evaluating large charities is that they often run tens, even hundreds, of programmes. We call these types of charities ‘MANGOs’, standing for ‘multi-armed NGOs’. An example of a MANGO is Oxfam. In 2023, it reported running 727 programmes across diverse areas such as economic and gender justice, climate action, and humanitarian response.^[60]

The charities in our sample only run a single (or a few) programmes. Assessing one programme carefully in terms of WELLBYs per dollar is a considerable task. Assessing a MANGO requires an evaluation of every individual programme and weighing them by budget allocation to calculate average cost-effectiveness. This is out of scope. The alternative would be guesswork, which would not be informative. Leaving aside the focus of WELLBYs per dollar, it is very hard to find cost-effectiveness assessments by charities of any kind. Out of the largest 100 charities in the UK,^[61] we can only provide a ballpark cost-effectiveness estimate for two, and this is because they have a clear primary output.

The Royal National Lifeboat Institute (RNLI) is a UK charity that rescues people in danger at sea. In 2023, they report saving a total of 269 people^[62] and a total expenditure of £242.6m^[63] ($303.3m).^[64] These figures imply a cost of $902k per life saved. We estimate that each life they save produces an average of 177 WELLBYs.^[65] This results in a cost per WELLBY of $6,386, not accounting for any psychological benefits for the wider population.^[66]

The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association spent around £74m on guide dogs in 2023^[67] and reported that they formed 469 new guide dog partnerships. We estimate, based on three limited studies, that having a guide dog leads to a 0.7-point increase in life satisfaction which is a very large effect per year.^[68] Guide dogs work for seven years on average.^[69] Therefore, we estimate that one extra guide dog leads to 4.83 WELLBYs (counting just the impact on humans). This means the total impact in 2023 was 2,266 WELLBYs, costing $40,767 per WELLBY.

While these two organisations are clearly making a difference to people’s lives, our very shallow estimates suggest they are substantially less cost-effective than the top charities in our sample which cost around $18 per WELLBY.

Our second concern about MANGOs – on top of the assessment challenge – is the ‘dilution effect’. A MANGO’s cost-effectiveness will be the combined cost-effectiveness of its individual programmes. If an organisation has one very cost-effective programme, adding a low cost-effectiveness programme will reduce its average impact per dollar. To remain as cost-effective, it has to add a programme that is just as efficient. For a MANGO to be more cost-effective than the top charities in our sample, their average (budget-weighted) programme would need to be as good as the best single programme NGOs. This means some of their programmes need to be better than anything we’ve observed so far. This isn’t impossible, but it seems unlikely. As a result, we expect MANGOs to be less cost-effective than charities that do one thing well.

Considering the funding allocated to MANGOs and how little is known about their cost-effectiveness, we encourage further work on this by researchers and the charities themselves. Indeed, we hope MANGOs see the value of the WELLBY approach. It makes it possible to compare otherwise incomparable programmes. This means charities can see what works well and what does not. By reallocating resources from the least to the most impactful options, MANGOs could make a far greater difference.

Homelessness interventions

As well as donating to large, well-known charities, many people donate to small, local causes or even individuals. When people think of ‘charity’, we expect that helping the poor and homeless in their local area is one of the first things that comes to mind.^[70] For the purposes of comparison, we briefly try to estimate the impact of helping the homeless using two analyses of homelessness interventions.

Frijters and Krekel (2021) estimate, based on an RCT, that providing “housing first” for people experiencing homelessness is reasonably effective, providing 0.67 WELLBYs per person.^[71] However, they also found it was very expensive, costing around $23k per person. Thus, they concluded that providing a housing first intervention costs $35k per WELLBY,^[72] which is about 2,000 times less cost-effective than the top charities in our sample.

However, economic theory suggests that cash is (typically) better as it allows you to buy whatever you want.^[73] We found one study looking at cash transfers to homeless people living in Vancouver, Canada.^[74] This RCT looked at unconditional, lump-sum cash transfers of 7,500 CAD (6,637 USD). Based on the results of the trial, we model that the impact lasts for two years, leading to an overall effect of 0.33 WELLBYs costing $6,667 per person.^[75] This leads to a cost per WELLBY of $19,994. This is more promising than ‘housing first’, but still hundreds of times less impactful per dollar than the best-performing alternatives.

An obvious limitation of our estimates is the exclusion of possible ‘spillover’ benefits, for instance, that homeless people, once housed, require fewer emergency services.^[76] Nevertheless, we think these estimates provide at least some evidence to suggest that a very common charitable act, helping the homeless, is difficult to do cost-effectively.^[77]

Questions and objections

In this section, we anticipate some questions and concerns that we haven’t addressed so far and provide brief responses. We end with some concluding remarks for donors and researchers.

How much should I give?

As a rule of thumb, the right amount to give is the largest amount that you can sustain. Peter Singer (the originator of the Shallow Pond thought experiment) proposes a stepped scale. It starts at 1% for those earning $40k-$80k, is 5% between $80k-$120k, and eventually rises to 50% for those earning over $50m.^[78]

Will giving make me happier?

As we mentioned earlier, the evidence indicates it does.^[79] However, this is presumably only up to a limit. We know of no research on the tipping point of when giving reduces our wellbeing.

What about causes you haven’t discussed?

WELLBY cost-effectiveness allows us to shine a bright, scientifically credible, and evidence-based light in a narrow spot: the topics where we have good self-reported wellbeing data. This is both a strength and a limitation. Our exclusion of charities from other areas, such as climate change and animal welfare, doesn’t mean those topics have no value; only that the more we want to go beyond the existing evidence, the more we have to peer into the darkness and speculate. For instance, there is no clear theoretical problem with applying the WELLBY approach to climate change interventions – at base, it involves estimating the impacts on wellbeing now versus wellbeing later – but any analysis will rest heavily on assumptions about long-term effects.^[80] We hope that readers will be interested in the evidence we’ve assembled here, but not especially interested in our opinions, which is why we don’t extend the analysis beyond the available data.

I already give to [insert charity]. Is it wrong to switch my donations to a more cost-effective charity?

In short: no. Some people are understandably reluctant to switch because it feels like they are letting down the organisation they’ve been supporting and the people it benefits. But if you think an alternative charity will do more good per dollar, it helps to keep in mind the greater total benefit you’ll cause by supporting that alternative.

Should I split my donations?

A simple answer is that, if you want to maximise your impact, you should only give to the charity you think is most cost-effective. However, that organisation could reach ‘diminishing marginal returns’.^[81] For instance, their budget gets filled and they can’t usefully spend the money, so they stop being as cost-effective. At that point, you should switch to the next best option, and so on. This implies small donors shouldn’t switch, but perhaps large donors should as they have enough money to fill one organisation’s budget and then move to the next.^[82]

However, this simple answer isn’t very satisfying. One problem is that it’s often very hard to compare the options. For instance, you might care about helping people today and helping future generations (or helping globally and helping locally, and so on). Lots of us have the intuition we don’t really know how to compare these, but we want to do something about both. Faced with this problem, you might have a current people ‘bucket’ and a future generations ‘bucket’, then somehow split your budget between these, and then try to identify the best thing(s) in each. The authors share the intuition that this is the right approach, but it’s unclear how to justify it or make the details precise, and very little seems to have been written on it in philosophy.^[83]

Another issue is that many people have a strong desire to split. Perhaps you’re not motivated to give everything to a ‘boring-but-effective’ charity (even if you think that would make the most difference) and you want to give something to a cause that tugs on your heartstrings. In this case, it’s clearly better to split your donations, rather than give nothing. Perhaps you give 80% to the boring-but-effective option and 20% to your ‘heartstrings’ project to stay motivated. Again, the best giving is sustainable.

What about inequality?

Lots of people have the intuition that it’s more important to increase the happiness of someone who’s at 3/10 than someone who’s at 8/10, even if the costs and all other factors are the same. This can be understood as a concern for equality, not merely efficiency. None of the estimates in our sample account for equality: they treat a 1-point increase as having the same value for both the 3/10 and the 8/10 person.^[84]

Further work could examine this, but we don’t think accounting for equality would change the rankings. The most cost-effective charities tend to target people with low happiness anyway – what makes them so efficient is that they address serious problems. For instance, StrongMinds and Friendship Bench help depressed people in low-income countries, some of the worst-off people on the planet. In contrast, the less cost-effective options in the sample are often targeting better-off people in a wealthy country. So, adding in an equality factor would probably exaggerate the differences, making the most cost-effective options look more valuable, rather than reverse the results.

Concluding remarks

For donors

The main takeaway for donors is that charities vary hugely in terms of cost-effectiveness. By picking carefully, we can have vastly more impact on happiness for the same monetary cost. We have to emphasise how extraordinary the differences in charity cost-effectiveness are. When we are buying items for ourselves we are typically delighted when there’s a sale and we discover we can get 20% more for our money. But if you want to buy happiness for other people, you can potentially get 100x, or more, by donating to the most cost-effective charities. It would be like a store running a secret campaign where you spend $10 on a phone charger and receive a complimentary $1,000 laptop.

Research on WELLBY cost-effectiveness is in its early days, for both policies and charities. We hope more research will be done, even better charities will be revealed, that the estimates we have presented will be updated, and therefore this chapter will quickly become outdated.

For those wanting to see the latest findings and recommendations, we advise you to visit www.happierlivesinstitute.org which acts as a living literature review for the cost-effectiveness of (top) charities.

From a global and historical perspective, you are probably much wealthier than you realise. The difference you can make to people’s happiness globally is probably far greater than you ever thought – if you follow the evidence and support the best charities. We often want to help other people and make the world better, but feel like there’s nothing we can do. We hope we’ve shown that’s not true. We can do a great deal. It’s up to each of us to decide what to do.

For researchers

This chapter has only scratched the surface of applying wellbeing cost-effectiveness analysis to maximising philanthropic returns. There are many ways for researchers to contribute to this new, and important field.

First and foremost, we need more wellbeing cost-effectiveness analyses in general. We know so little about the huge variety of things that could be funded or done. Particularly, we need more analyses to be published in academia to stress test the methodology and develop best practices.

In our research so far, we have found there’s often information on the direct, immediate impact on recipients, but very sparse data on all the other aspects. There is practically no information on household spillovers. This is crucial given that in some cases, as we have argued,^[85] household members as a whole will get a greater total benefit than the direct recipient.

Evidence on the duration of benefits is also often missing. Again, it seems very plausible that some interventions will last much longer than others, so long-term data will have a large influence on effectiveness estimates.^[86]

Lastly, the benefits of some interventions are inherently more difficult to quantify because they have a particularly long-term or diffuse group of beneficiaries. Examples of this include climate change,^[87] children (who can’t report their wellbeing reliably),^[88] education,^[89] cultural activities,^[90] research,^[91] and religious activities.^[92] However, even for these, we believe that it is possible to use existing evidence to get a better sense of their effect on wellbeing.

There are many other methodological questions, such as empirical and philosophical issues relating to extending versus improving lives,^[93] or how to trade-off between internal and external validity.^[94]

We believe these are all rich veins of inquiry waiting to be mined. Wellbeing cost-effectiveness is an unusual area. Barely any work has been done but it has huge and direct practical implications. We hope researchers take up the challenge and use their skills to make a difference.

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Endnotes