Should SoGive publish more notes from calls with charities?

• SoGive works with major donors.

• As part of our work, we meet with several (10-30 per year) charities, generally ones recommended by evaluators we trust, or (occasionally) recommended by our own research.

• We learn a lot through these conversations. This suggests that we might want to publish our call notes so that others can also learn about the charities we speak with.

• Given that we take notes during the calls anyway, it might seem that it would be low cost for us to simply publish those. This would be deceptive. 

  • There is a non-trivial time cost for us, partly because documents which are published are held to a higher standard than those which are purely internal, but mostly because of our relationship with the charities. We want them to feel confident that they can speak openly with us. This means not only an extra step in the process (ie sharing a draft with the organisation before publishing) but also considering whether we should deliberately self-censor (i.e. avoid mentioning some relevant details if we think they are sensitive, so that we can honestly say that we're avoiding mentioning something and it's not because the charity is asking us to).

• Understanding how much appetite there is for this will help us prioritise our time. In case it's helpful, spending less time on this likely means spending more time on: reviewing and understanding charities, sharing that information with donors that we work with, further developing our tools relating to moral weights, writing up more about core effective questions like give now / give later, and strategic questions like if/how to apply a worldview diversification approach.

• Some previous examples are this (old) set of call notes with NTI, and this (also old) set of call notes with CATF. As can be seen from these examples, the notes simply set out what we learned in a 1-hour call, which largely focuses on better understanding what the organisation does. There often is some analytical content, but it's generally not sufficient to justify a decision to donate, which is justified on other grounds.