Launch HN: Effective Altruism Funds (YC W17 Nonprofit)

Hi HN! We’re the founders of the Centre for Effective Altruism, a nonprofit from Oxford, UK in the YC W17 batch. We’re the creators of Effective Altruism (EA) Funds, (https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds/) high-impact, individual giving portfolios, managed by expert researchers. It's like Vanguard for charity.

We created EA Funds because we became frustrated with how difficult it was to find the best giving opportunities as an individual donor. Using EA Funds, you choose a problem area, and our fund managers find the best giving opportunities. Our initial funds are all managed by Program Officers at the Open Philanthropy Project, a $10B private foundation. In the future, we hope to expand the number of funds, building a competitive marketplace for giving, where the amount of funding a charity receives is directly correlated with the amount of good they do.

We started out 7 years ago, when 23 of our friends pledged to give 10% of their income to the most effective charities they could find. Since then, 2700 people have joined us, donating $33M, including $17M last year. We’ve found that some of the most cost-effective charities can buy one year of perfect health (a DALY) for as little as $80, while others have no effect. A study in the US found that $10B was spent each year on social programs that had been proven to have no effect on outcomes, and a further $1B was spent on programs that were actively harmful. We built EA Funds to replicate the success of groups like the Gates Foundation and GiveWell. By pooling our resources and utilising the expertise of our research community, we can give individual donors the same impact per dollar as billion dollar foundations.

We’d love to hear your feedback and answer questions about effective altruism, donating effectively or hear your stories about the charity sector!

(Edit: originally said QALY instead of DALY, but that was a typo, as commenters pointed out.)

This is really interesting and a great idea; however, I'd almost trust charities more if they listed how they had failed each year and where delivery and services went wrong and what mitigation has been put in place.

It would be good to have a system where charities were allowed to fail like bad companies as well, but it's difficult to be this honest.

Thanks, we completely agree!

Right now, the incentives in the charity sector are totally screwed. The charities which get the biggest are the ones with the best marketing, not the ones which have the most impact. That means that big charities often hide their mistakes and focus on maintaining a wholesome image.

In contrast, many of the organizations we work with regularly publish their mistakes and lessons. By sharing this kind of information, the whole sector can learn and improve. In particular, GiveWell (http://www.givewell.org/about/our-mistakes) has a great page listing their mistakes.

We've been especially impressed with charities like New Incentives, who realised that the original target population they were trying to serve (pregnant women with HIV) wasn't big enough, so they pivoted to focus on incentivizing mothers to vaccinate their children so that they could gather more evidence and have an even bigger impact.

With EA Funds, donors pick which problems they want their donation to solve, and we find the best giving opportunities. We will fund both new start-up style charities and larger more validated approaches. We will fund charities which have run failed programs in the past, provided that they have updated their approach.

Thanks, please do let us know if you spot any issues, want to suggest any new features or have any other feedback!

The charities themselves rarely do that directly (unfortunately, as the OP said, the incentives are really messed-up so they would never do so), but GiveWell does it "by proxy" every year, so if you donate to GiveWell's "general fund" you can be sure that they're iterating and correcting for failures.

In terms of other feedback, I have to say I really like the clean separation of "ends" and how you can pick which one(s) you want. TBH, I've been getting increasingly annoyed at how the X-risk people are gradually taking over EA, but I don't want to just quit or blow up at them either (they mean well even if I think they're misguided). This looks like a way that everyone can be happy. Please don't let them needle you into adding that stuff into the Global Development or Animal Welfare funds.