[This was originally posted as a response in the wrong thread—I’ve deleted the incorrectly placed response.]
Hi, David,
Thanks for tagging us in this suggestion! We’re happy to see people talking about the creation of more compelling resources to correct misperceptions and get people thinking about the true cost of saving a life.
This doesn’t seem exactly like what you have in mind, as it was more narrowly focused on GiveWell’s recommended charities, but in the past we provided an impact calculator on our site. It allowed users to insert a donation amount and choose a GiveWell top charity to give to, and would return the number of outputs (e.g., nets or vitamin A supplements distributed) and outcomes (e.g., lives saved).
We stopped sharing the impact calculator in November 2021, because we didn’t feel confident enough in our ability to produce a useful forward-looking estimate of an individual donation’s impact. We now report on the impact of past grants directed by GiveWell (see this spreadsheet, for example, and our 2021 cost per life saved estimates for top charities). We feel that giving the estimated cost per life saved of a past grant to a program serves as a helpful proxy for the impact of a future donation to that same program, even if we can’t count on the impact remaining the same.
We’ve written a bit more about why we focus on backwards-looking impact estimates here and here.
[This was originally posted as a response in the wrong thread—I’ve deleted the incorrectly placed response.]
Hi, David,
Thanks for tagging us in this suggestion! We’re happy to see people talking about the creation of more compelling resources to correct misperceptions and get people thinking about the true cost of saving a life.
This doesn’t seem exactly like what you have in mind, as it was more narrowly focused on GiveWell’s recommended charities, but in the past we provided an impact calculator on our site. It allowed users to insert a donation amount and choose a GiveWell top charity to give to, and would return the number of outputs (e.g., nets or vitamin A supplements distributed) and outcomes (e.g., lives saved).
We stopped sharing the impact calculator in November 2021, because we didn’t feel confident enough in our ability to produce a useful forward-looking estimate of an individual donation’s impact. We now report on the impact of past grants directed by GiveWell (see this spreadsheet, for example, and our 2021 cost per life saved estimates for top charities). We feel that giving the estimated cost per life saved of a past grant to a program serves as a helpful proxy for the impact of a future donation to that same program, even if we can’t count on the impact remaining the same.
We’ve written a bit more about why we focus on backwards-looking impact estimates here and here.
Best,
Miranda Kaplan
GiveWell Communications Associate