I think this is a great area to experiment with, so I’d be keen for people to just go and try it on a small scale and see what works.
One problem to bear in mind is that the best EA content is about cause selection and intervention selection, and charities are usually unwilling to change these dimensions. Whereas there’s already a lot of advice for people who just want to implement an intervention more effectively.
I agree. The bulk of the variance in ‘charity effectiveness’ looks to be along intervention lines. If charities are fairly hard to budge on these, then it looks less likely that efforts to shift the entire distribution of charities to the right are going to work better than focusing on the extreme right tail in the first place.
I agree that trying to branch out to, or add an EA cause to a current charities is unlikely to succeed. My experience is that you are right—there are lots of services and advice out there for charities that want to improve implementation or strategy (mainly focused around cultivating donors).
I would be interested to know if there are many resources out there aimed at getting organizations to collect more data. To asses their success rates more scientifically. It is also my understanding that the advice out there for creating more effective implementation is usually based around just getting better numbers, not if those numbers actually make change in a given cause area.
What would you suggest is a good place to start for small scale experimentation? I think you are right, just doing some of this is the best way to gauge tractability.
I’m interested in helping organizations collect more data, using independent surveys of households to measure bed net usage, as well as surveys around deworming programs. One organization that conducts independent surveys is PMA2020. They currently have family planning and WASH surveys, but may add additional modules in the future.
I think this is a great area to experiment with, so I’d be keen for people to just go and try it on a small scale and see what works.
One problem to bear in mind is that the best EA content is about cause selection and intervention selection, and charities are usually unwilling to change these dimensions. Whereas there’s already a lot of advice for people who just want to implement an intervention more effectively.
I agree. The bulk of the variance in ‘charity effectiveness’ looks to be along intervention lines. If charities are fairly hard to budge on these, then it looks less likely that efforts to shift the entire distribution of charities to the right are going to work better than focusing on the extreme right tail in the first place.
I agree that trying to branch out to, or add an EA cause to a current charities is unlikely to succeed. My experience is that you are right—there are lots of services and advice out there for charities that want to improve implementation or strategy (mainly focused around cultivating donors).
I would be interested to know if there are many resources out there aimed at getting organizations to collect more data. To asses their success rates more scientifically. It is also my understanding that the advice out there for creating more effective implementation is usually based around just getting better numbers, not if those numbers actually make change in a given cause area.
What would you suggest is a good place to start for small scale experimentation? I think you are right, just doing some of this is the best way to gauge tractability.
I’m interested in helping organizations collect more data, using independent surveys of households to measure bed net usage, as well as surveys around deworming programs. One organization that conducts independent surveys is PMA2020. They currently have family planning and WASH surveys, but may add additional modules in the future.
Some relevant organisations:
http://giving-evidence.com/about/
http://www.thinknpc.org/
http://www.bridgespan.org/
There’s also the whole ‘strategic philanthropy’ scene generally:
http://www.ssireview.org/up_for_debate/article/strategic_philanthropy