Frequently asked questions

The Good Giving List was created by Giving Evidence, an independent organisation founded to encourage and enable effective charitable giving which is based on sound evidence.

The Good Giving List’s process is based on research by independent research organisations. The Good Giving List then screens that research to identify possible candidate charities, and researches them. Our research criteria and process are outlined here and described in great detail here.

We do not take a view on that. This is because the charities vary in their goals, which prevents comparing them in a meaningful rigorous way. For example, some of them reduce crime, others improve educational attainment and one improves care for children: those seem to us fundamentally different goals such that it is not useful to rank them. Even within the charities which have the same outcome, there are material differences: for instance, the Good Giving List recommends several charities which reduce re-offending: but some of those may work with people who are ‘more difficult’, and therefore a simple comparison of the numbers (the reduction in rate of re-offending of the people served by two charities) might be misleading.

Because we are based in the UK and most money which are given by UK donors stay in the UK, and, to date, there has been very little reliable public guidance for donors wanting to support charities operating in the UK. In other words, most of the money given in the UK are given without any independent guidance, research or analysis: to date, most UK donors have been on their own.

The Good Giving List remedies that, by providing independent recommendations of UK charities.

At launch, we are making recommendations in three sectors, each based on an independent ‘Evidence Producer’. Those are:

1. Criminal justice: our recommendations in criminal justice are based on research by the UK Ministry of Justice Data Lab;
2. Education: our recommendations in education are based on research by the Education Endowment Foundation, a charity set up with a founding grant of £125m from the UK Government Department for Education, and designated by the UK Government as the “What Works Centre for Education”;
3. Children and young people: our recommendations here are based on research by the What Works Centre on Children’s Social Care, and the Early Intervention Foundation, which have recently merged. They are both part of the UK government’s What Works Network.

We hope to add recommendations in further sectors over time.

We will only operate in sectors where there is a suitable Evidence Producer: i.e., an independent entity which produces reliable research into the effectiveness of work in that area. We may work with other UK What Works Centres and we are in discussions with several of them.

No. Giving Evidence has no financial relationship with any of the charities listed or recommended on this website. Charities cannot pay to be included or considered, and do not pay to be included: Giving Evidence takes no cut of donations that you make to them. Our process for identifying charities to recommend is explained briefly here, and in nauseating detail here.

The Good Giving List was created by Giving Evidence, using a grant from a charitable foundation which wishes to remain anonymous.

That is not how The Good Giving List works. Instead, The Good Giving List’s work starts with reliable research produced by independent Evidence Producers, and we draw our recommendations from that work.

Our process and criteria for identifying charities to recommend are explained briefly here, and in more detail here.

We are not claiming that. We have not scoured all the charities in the UK and then chosen the best. Rather, the list is charities which deliver evidence-based programmes i.e., programmes which independent research has found to be effective. In general, that research is of that programme as delivered by that charity.

Some of the charities recommended on The Good Giving List run many other programmes too, and if there is not independent research into those programmes, we are not saying anything about those other programmes. (See: why we recommend whole organisations)

We have used independent rigorous research produced by various independent organisations (we call them ‘Evidence Producers’).

No. We know them, and our goal – encouraging effective charitable giving – is related to that of Effective Altruism, but there are material differences in our approaches.