Brigid Slipka

If you’re seeking to choose a charity to support, would you rather choose from among thousands of charities, or a mere half-dozen?

My gut instinct is to go with the many-options path.  I’d feel that there would be something inherently better about a nonprofit if I’ve picked it out of 5,500 rather than from a limited handful.  If I’m looking for the very best among nonprofits, I want to have the broadest array of organizations to choose from.  The more nonprofits I can consider, the more likely my gift will be the type of high-impact philanthropy I’m aiming for.  Right?

Prolly not.

Paradoxically, having many options when making our philanthropic choices can lead us to have less of an impact with our giving.

Donors can’t analyze all the choices.

Analyzing a nonprofit for impact is hard.  You have to check not just that it’s financially sound, but that the programmatic work is making a demonstrable impact.  Like any instructions that include the word “demonstrable,” this takes lotsa time.  You have to ask the big questions: how is this work different from other charities?  Is the problem addressed a charitable issue or a policy one?  What’s the percentage of people affected by this programming versus no programming at all?

Needling in for the answers from even just one nonprofit takes time that most of us don’t have.  If you’re wealthy, you can hire a philanthropic advisor or pay foundation staff to do this.   If you’re the rest of us, this is not an option.  So instead:

Donors end up making shortcuts somehow, and these can lead to harmful gifts.

Without an expert to guide us, negligible-net-worth individuals will make shortcuts.  Probably, we won’t even realize that it is a shortcut.  We’ll just ending up deciding where to give based on a solicitation in the mail or a mention on the news or a celebrity’s tweet (or lack thereof).

But unfortunately, too many charities end up doing more harm than good, albeit inadvertently.  If we’re not scrupulous in our nonprofit evaluation, our gifts will not merely miss the high-impact mark but vault into the territory of negative-impact.

Donors won’t be donors at all.

When faces with a dizzying array of choices, we frequently go with the simplest option: none at all.

A 1995 study gave customers the option to taste-test a variety of jams.  First group could taste from among 24 jams, and 60% of passers-by took a taste.  The second group could taste from only 6 jams, and there was a reduction in the number of takers: 40% opted for a sample.

BUT: Of the second group with the limited options, 30% of tasters went on to buy some.  In the first group, though many more sampled, only 3% of people actually bought.  Put another way: With 6 options, 12 people out of 100 bought.  With 24 options, only 2 people.

And the rest said: Eh, fuggedaboudit.

While I’m cautious about applying studies like this willy-nilly, there’s likely a philanthropic parallel here.  I’d be very interested to know how many people who visit Charity Navigator’s site go on to give versus how many people give after visiting GiveWell.  Without this data, I can only offer myself as an example.  When faced with the self-appointed task of choosing among the many water-related charities, I ended up giving: nowhere at all.

And this is why today’s announcement from GiveWell, Philanthropedia, and Root Cause of six-and-only-six recommended charities is so noteworthy.  With charitable options severely limited, donors might now be free to stop thinking about high-impact giving and actually start doing it.  By removing choice in high-impact giving, GiveWell & Philanthropedia & Root Cause may just have set the stage for increasing it.

(More on the paradox of choice here, book entitled the same here, summary of book here).