Evaluating Charities

The New York Times discusses the addition of a new duo in the quest to evaluate the impact of philanthropy.

GiveWell’s findings are available on the Internet, without charge, at www.givewell.net. In evaluating charities, Mr. Karnofsky and Mr. Hassenfeld press them for information, analyzing the numbers in much the same way they did at Bridgewater. The Smile Train, for instance, a charity that repairs cleft palates, was asked how much it spent in each region and each country to treat how many patients in each.

Mr. Karnofsky and Mr. Hassenfeld argue that widely available existing systems for charity evaluation, which rely largely on the charities’ tax forms, known as 990s, are basically worthless because charities are given wide latitude in how they classify information. For example, some charities count fund-raising costs as money spent on programs.