FAQ

We recommend charities that

Focus on final outcomes:

Charities that prioritise the final outcome of their action and not indicators of impact. When talking about impact, it is essential to focus on the desired final outcome, such as improved opportunities and quality of life, rather than focusing on intermediate outcomes such as the number of books distributed.

Measure their impact

It’s surprising how few charities measure their impact. Our top recommended charities  use scientific methods to evaluate the results of their actions, ensuring that their interventions produce the desired effects. 

Are cost-effective

They save or improve the most lives per euro donated to them. Eg) our top recommended global health charities can save a life for as little as 3,000 euros, our top climate charities can avoid one ton of carbon emissions for just 1 euro and our top animal welfare charities can spare thousands of animals from factory farming for the same price of saving one animal in a refuge. 

Are independently evaluated

All of our top charities are independently evaluated by world leading charity evaluators. See more information below.

We do NOT recommend charities based on their:

Location

A life is valuable whether it is based in France or the developing world. 

Tax deductibility

Our top recommended charities are all tax deductible in Switzerland, but not in France. This is because French tax law dictates that a charity must operate from France in order to be tax deductible. We always prioritise the impact of a charity over its tax deductible status.

Overhead costs

Some of our charities such as Against Malaria Foundation have very low overhead costs, and some such as Clean Air Task Force – have much higher overhead costs. To explain why we don’t take overhead costs into account in our recommendations, imagine two charities: 

• Charity A spends 10,000 euros a month on it’s operations and saves 1 life
• Charity B spends 20,000 euros a month on it’s operations and saves 6 lives

In the above examples Charity A saves 1 life for every 10,000 spent on it, whereas Charity B saves 1 life for every 3,300 euros spent on it. In this example – it’s clear to see that it’s not overhead costs that are important – but in fact the ratio of overhead costs to the desired impact. Research suggests that there is not much of a correlation at all between overhead and effectiveness.

Read more about impactful charities 

Our recommendations are based on the research of independent experts 

Finding the best aid organisations isn’t that easy. That’s why we work closely with experts who have been conducting extensive and in-depth research on the subject for many years. These experts are completely independent and work at the cutting edge of charity evaluation in their respective cause areas. They conduct rigorous tests on hundreds of charities to find out as precisely as possible how much good their programs achieve per euro spent. By comparing the cost effectiveness of so many charities, they are able to short list the most effective charities to donate to in order for your donations to have the biggest impact. 

The charity evaluators whose research we primarily rely on are:

GLOBAL HEALTH AND DEVELOPMENT: GiveWell

GiveWell is the world’s leading research organisation that studies global health and development charities. 

‘We search for the charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar. Our goal is to produce the world’s top research on where to give. Free, for everyone. We recommend a small number of charities that do an incredible amount of good’ (GiveWell)

GiveWell was founded in 2007 by Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, two former hedge fund employees. They wanted to do as much good as possible with their donations and found that there was little solid information available on how to do this. GiveWell invests more than 40,000 hours of research each year and has raised more than €1 billion for high-impact charities, saving an estimated 150,000 lives.

ANIMAL WELFARE: EA Animal Welfare Funds 

The EA Animal Welfare Fund was rated as the top animal charity evaluator by GWWC’s ‘evaluating the evaluators project’ in 2024. They are therefore the primary charity evaluator we defer to in order to choose our top animal charities. We meet with them every few months to get up to date recommendations. They conduct thorough research into various animal welfare organisations to find those that help the most animals per dollar. 

CLIMATE CHANGE: Giving Green

Giving Green is a nonprofit organisation that spends thousands of hours each year reviewing studies and climate charities to find the most cost effective interventions to combat climate change. From this research, they publish their top recommendations each year. Their team is made up of climate scientists, economists and impact evaluation experts with decades of experience working at the intersection of evidence-based policy and the environment. We meet regularly with Giving Green to discuss our climate recommendations and run climate workshops in collaboration with eachother.

Other evaluators

Although we primarily defer to GiveWell, Giving Green and EA Animal Welfare Fund, we also read the research of other top charity evaluators including LongView Philanthropy, Founders Pledge and Animal Charity Evaluators to ensure we are not overly-reliant on any one source of research. When choosing our top charities we prefer organisations whose effectiveness is corroborated by multiple independent evaluators.

Our top recommended charities are the most effective charities in the world within their respective cause areas. We only add new charities to our short list if they meet the same high bar as our existing charities. This means that you can donate with confidence on our platform, knowing that the charities we recommend are equivalent in terms of effectiveness. We are able to provide advice about charities that aren’t on our list. If you would like bespoke donation advice, please don’t hesitate to  get in touch with us.

We recommend our top charities purely on the basis of how cost-effective they are with their impact – ie) how much good you can do with each euro you donate, and not on the basis of where they are located.  We fundamentally believe that helping more people is better than helping less, a human life is worth the same no matter where they live and an animal life is worth the same no matter their species. 

Many French and Swiss charities do not work on global issues and mostly spend their money on national issues. This is unfortunate because France and Switzerland are two of the richest countries in the world. All of the problems that are easy and cheap to tackle have often already been solved in rich countries. Those that remain are often expensive and difficult to define and solve. In poor countries, the simpler problems have often not yet been addressed. For this reason, you can have more impact per euro by donating to charities that focus on problems that are easy and cheap to address in poor countries. In France for example, the government puts the value of a human life at 3 million euros. Contrast this with the fact that with just 5,000 euros you can save the life of someone from Mali by supplying vitamin A supplements and it’s easy to see why our top charity recommendations are operating overseas. 

The Navy Seal Foundation, which grants scholarships to military personnel in high-income countries, and the Against Malaria Foundation, which provides bed nets to protect people from malaria in low-income countries, were both granted a perfect score of 100 and deemed “highly cost-effective” by Charity Navigator even though the good done per dollar is vastly different. In the first case, $3,200 would raise one recipient’s income by $7,500; in the second, it would provide about 640 bednets, which would protect 1,280 people from malaria for up to four years.

In the past, Charity Navigator focused primarily on a charity’s financial health and its ratio of programme-to-administrative costs, rather than evaluating what the charity’s programmes accomplished. However, in recent years, we’ve been happy to see Charity Navigator add an Impact & Results scoring metric that provides a cost-effectiveness rating and aims to look at what the programme is accomplishing per dollar donated. 

That said, there are still several differences between the methods our vetted evaluators use to measure impact and recommend charities and the way Charity Navigator scores charities on impact. These differences mean that Charity Navigator lists a huge number of charities as top-rated, even though there are substantial differences in impact among them. Some of the differences between Charity Navigator’s impact evaluations and ours include:

• Charity Navigator states that it does not currently have the infrastructure to assess the impact of all program types/charities. However, charities can still achieve a four-star rating even if the impact of its programmes has not been assessed. This indicates that Charity Navigator’s main focus is not (yet) on assessing impact.

• When the data does exist, the Impact & Results rating is only weighted at 50%, meaning Charity Navigator places equal weight on impact and a combination of its other metrics. Most of our vetted charity evaluators place the most weight on programme impact.

• Regarding the data, Charity Navigator states that its Impact & Results rating uses “information that was either publicly available or charity-submitted to estimate the actual impact a charity’s program has on people’s lives.” However, charities often report misleading cost-effectiveness figures that are overly optimistic. Because Charity Navigator rates such a high volume of charities, it’s unlikely that it is able to do a deep-dive into the cost-effectiveness of each charity it evaluates. In contrast, impact-focused evaluators typically identify particular types of charities that are likely to be highly effective through cause area prioritisation and programme prioritisation, and then are able to do a much deeper investigation into each charity they evaluate.

• Most importantly, when scoring a charity, Charity Navigator does not take into account the huge variation in impact and cost-effectiveness that arises from your choice of which problems and programs to donate to. Charity Navigator’s rating methodology guide states: “We categorize nonprofits based on their programmatic focus, and each category has specific benchmark levels for cost-effectiveness. These benchmarks serve as a reference for assessing the relative impact of nonprofits operating within that particular program category.” This means that a charity can get a high-impact rating even if its programmatic focus is relatively low impact when compared to other programmes.

• For example, the Navy Seal Foundation, which grants scholarships to military personnel in high-income countries, and the Against Malaria Foundation, which provides bed nets to protect people from malaria in low-income countries, were both granted a perfect score of 100 and deemed “highly cost-effective” by Charity Navigator even though the good done per dollar is vastly different. In the first case, $3,200 would raise one recipient’s income by $7,500; in the second, it would provide about 640 bednets, which would protect 1,280 people from malaria for up to four years.