Season's greetings!
December has more to offer than family reunions and reflections on the year that was – it's also a popular time for charity. (One 2014 study found that over 30% of online charitable giving occurred in December alone!) But how do you make sure your donations help as much as possible? Our programs can help – starting with What Causes Match Your Values?, a new free tool for choosing the right cause to support.
It can be daunting to find a type of charity that's both right for your values and highly effective at advancing its chosen mission. What Causes Match Your Values? makes the process of narrowing down altruistic causes as simple as answering some multiple-choice questions about your worldview and preferences. Based on a detailed flowchart for making altruistic decisions designed by the Global Priorities Project, this tool can help you figure out what kind of cause would be a good fit for you and how best to support it in a matter of minutes. When you're done, it'll wrap up your findings in a useful email reminder so you can plan your next step at your leisure.
Or, if you'd like to dive deeper into the world of truly effective giving, try out Leaving Your Mark On The World. It offers an in-depth mini-course about how to accurately gauge the effectiveness of any charity or nonprofit organization, with an emphasis on making sure that every dollar spent does the most good possible. It also features a tool for picking out specific organizations with strong track records– institutions that have been vetted by the world's most rigorous and data-savvy evaluators, so that you can feel the comfort of knowing what your backing will accomplish. We highly recommend Leaving Your Mark On The World if you want a one-stop solution for choosing which particular charitable organization is right for you to support.
Do you fancy yourself a good judge of which kinds of interventions tend to have big positive impacts already? Test your skills with The Charity Effectiveness Test. This fun quiz is an object lesson and a brain teaser in one – it challenges you to guess how successful 10 different social interventions were at achieving their desired aims based on short descriptions. You might find yourself surprised by just how tough it is to evaluate effectiveness!
To sum up:
Use the brand-new What Causes Match Your Values? tool to quickly determine which broad type of altruism would be a good fit for your ethical perspective.
Use Leaving Your Mark On The World to get better at gauging charitable effectiveness and get suggestions for specific organizations to support.
Measure your charity-evaluating mettle with The Charity Effectiveness Test.
And don’t forget to enjoy the holidays!
Warmly,
–The ClearerThinking.org team