Helen Keller International

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.