Is it better to fund direct work, or indirect work like research or campaigning?

Most charitable work fits into (or at least can be shoehorned into) one of the following categories:

• Directly working with beneficiaries
• Research
• Campaigning

Which is going to be the most effective way of tackling the issue?

This is a hard question, however we present here SoGive's tentative views on the topic. The thinking on this is tentative, unfinished and may yet change.

This image is an impressionistic way of capturing our unfinalised views on the topic. It has the following features:

• For direct work, there is a big blob close to zero effectiveness. The suggestion that lots of charities have close to zero impact is reasonable, we think, for the reasons set out here. The blob then extends up towards higher effectiveness, and it becomes thinner as it goes up, reflecting the fact that high-impact giving opportunities are harder to find. Some SoGive recommended charities are to be found around the pinnacle of this.
• For charitably funded research, the amount of impact achieved is assumed to be never zero or negative. This seems reasonable given that research is subject to a peer review process, however this is a questionable assumption, and one which we have not fully probed. On the other end of the scale, impactfulness per pound donated for research can compete with that of the most impactful charities that do direct work. However high impact research is hard to find. The crudely drawn diagram probably makes it look like these opportunities are easy to find when they are not -- indeed it is questionable whether I should have drawn this diagram as evenly spread as I did; arguably I should have put more weight lower down, however we haven't done enough of a review of the charity research sector to justify this. In particular, in the absence of information to the contrary, it seems likely that a randomly chosen research charity probably has lower cost-effectiveness than the SoGive-recommended charities. A separate post sets out the high-level reviews which we have done.
• For campaigning or lobbying work, there is a big question mark, to a large extent because assessing the impact of these is hard, particularly in the context of comparing them to research and direct work. It is easier to say something useful when comparing one campaigning charity with another (and even then not always that easy)