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How the Good Giving List works

Good evidence about the effectiveness of charities and the various programmes that they run is scarce. Many evaluations produced and commissioned by charities themselves aren’t of good quality: many evaluations are too small to draw reliable conclusions, or don’t include a comparator group which is needed to see the charity’s effect. (That comparator group shows what would have happened anyway, and the charity’s effect is the difference between that and what did happen to the group which the charity did serve).

But there are various independent organisations who conduct research about the effectiveness of the kinds of programmes that charities run. The Good Giving List uses their research. These “Evidence Producers” include various “What Works centres“, some of which are funded and supported by UK government, and the ‘Data Lab’ in the UK Ministry of Justice. Mostly, these independent Evidence Producers are aiming to inform public policy, rather than to evaluate charities, but Giving Evidence has (with them) used their research to identify charities which run programmes which their independent evidence indicates are effective. For example, the Good Giving List recommends the charity Tutor Trust because an evaluation of it by the ‘what works centre’ for education – the Education Endowment Foundation – found it to be effective.

Read more here about the Evidence Producers whose research underpins the Good Giving List’s charity recommendations.

The Good Giving List recommends charities only in sectors where we can find a suitable Evidence Producer.

Currently, the Good Giving List looks at three sectors:

Education: where our recommendations are based on research by the Education Endowment Foundation;
Children: where our recommendations are based on research by the What Works For Early Intervention and Children’s Social Care;
Crime reduction: where our recommendations come from the Ministry of Justice Data Lab.

There are Evidence Producers in some other sectors which we hope to add. But in some sectors, we do not know of a suitable Evidence Producer, so we have no recommendations there. Heritage is an example. We can only make recommendations where there is already reliable and relevant independent research.

The Good Giving List recommends charities which run programmes which robust research by independent Evidence Producers has found to work.

More information about how we choose charities to recommend is here.