Impact Evaluation

Should you give to the most well-known charities?

MSF, the Red Cross, UNICEF: organisations known and trusted worldwide. And yet none of them appear in the recommendations of GiveWell or the Happier Lives Institute. This article explains why, and what it means for the impact of your donations.

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When we think about donating, the same names come to mind: MSF, the Red Cross, UNICEF. Organisations present across the world, trusted for decades, whose legitimacy is beyond question.

And yet, if you consult the recommendations of international evaluators like GiveWell or the Happier Lives Institute, you won't find them. Not a single one.

This is no accident. These organisations have not structured their strategy and programmes around the question of where they can do the most good. This explains both their absence from evaluators' recommendations, and the fact that your donations can very probably achieve more elsewhere.

This article aims to share the mechanisms of prioritisation and effectiveness that can help you make more informed giving decisions. We will see that the question is not so much about the size of an organisation, but its capacity to use additional funds to help as many people as possible.

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What researchers have measured

BINGOs and MANGOs: naming what we observe

The term BINGO, for Big International Non-Governmental Organisation, refers to the large international humanitarian organisations that everyone knows: Oxfam, Save the Children, World Vision, Action Against Hunger, UNICEF, MSF, Médecins du Monde, Solidarités Internationale, the Red Cross. These organisations share several characteristics: budgets running into hundreds of millions of euros, a presence in dozens of countries, high media visibility, and solid institutional legitimacy.

Researchers at the Happier Lives Institute have introduced a more specific term for a subset of these: MANGOs, for Multi-Armed NGOs.[2] This term refers to organisations that manage a very large number of different programmes across varied fields. Oxfam, for example, simultaneously runs programmes in humanitarian emergency, economic justice, gender equality, governance, and climate justice. MSF operates in conflict zones, epidemic responses, acute malnutrition crises, and long-term health programmes.

In contrast, researchers use the term FoNGO, for Focused NGO, to describe organisations that do one thing in one domain. Against Malaria Foundation distributes insecticide-treated bed nets in at-risk areas. That is all. This distinction is not a value judgement: it is the starting point for understanding why charities can have very different impact potential.

Striking differences in impact, and they are measurable

The impact of a donation is the real change produced in the world through it, accounting for what would have happened anyway without that intervention. How many lives saved? How many years of good health gained? How many people lifted out of severe depression?

These questions may seem abstract, but they are increasingly measurable. Tools such as DALYs (Disability-Adjusted Life Years) and WELLBYs (Wellbeing-Adjusted Life Years) allow very different interventions to be compared on a single scale. GiveWell also considers other desirable outcomes, such as doubling household incomes in extreme poverty or improving access to contraception. It is partly on this basis that GiveWell, the Happier Lives Institute, and Giving Green build their recommendations.[1]

What is striking is the sheer scale of the gaps that this measurement reveals. According to an analysis by the Happier Lives Institute published in the World Happiness Report 2025, the best charities create around 150 times more wellbeing per euro than the average.[1] And the best interventions produce up to 3,500 times more effect than the charities that most commonly receive our donations.[2] This means we can measure in more cases than we think, and that it is always possible to prioritise. Learn more about the impact gap between charities.

A documented position, not a judgement

GiveWell is the world's most recognised research organisation for evaluating the impact of charitable giving in the field of global health. Since its founding in 2007, it has devoted tens of thousands of hours to analysing hundreds of charities with the aim of identifying those that save or improve the most lives per euro spent. The Happier Lives Institute is the first organisation to have produced a global comparison of charities in terms of wellbeing created per dollar, published in the World Happiness Report 2025.

Neither organisation recommends Save the Children, World Vision, UNICEF, or Action Against Hunger. Not out of distrust. But because their research has led to a precise conclusion: the very structure of these organisations makes any rigorous evaluation of your donation's impact almost impossible, and your giving would very probably be more effective directed towards the charities they do recommend.[4]

It is important to say clearly: Oxfam, the Red Cross, MSF and their counterparts have a positive impact. One can acknowledge that they have a large impact in absolute terms. But that tells us nothing about whether they achieve a large impact relative to their budget, nor whether an additional euro entrusted to them will be used as effectively as possible to help the greatest number. Yet these are precisely the two questions that should guide a donation.

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The concrete manifestations of a single underlying problem

The fact that these organisations have not structured their strategy around where they can do the most good manifests itself in several ways. These are not independent arguments: they are illustrations of the same phenomenon seen from different angles.

Hundreds of programmes: when structure follows opportunities

Large charities often highlight the breadth of their presence in their communications and fundraising campaigns: "we operate in more than 90 countries", "we manage 500 projects simultaneously". These figures are presented as marks of legitimacy and seriousness. They should instead be read as warning signs.

Designing and deploying one of the world's most effective programmes to help others is extraordinarily difficult work. It requires years of research to identify the most promising intervention, rigorous trials to measure its real effects, constant adjustments, and highly specific expertise for each context. Against Malaria Foundation has been recommended by GiveWell for over fifteen years: the result of continuous work refining its distribution method and evaluating its impact. It is almost impossible for a single board of trustees and a single leadership team to reach this level of excellence across multiple programmes simultaneously, in domains as different as humanitarian emergency, governance, education, and nutrition. Managing a hundred programmes means accepting that each one receives a fraction of the attention, resources, and expertise it would need to be executed at the highest level.

If large NGOs accumulate so many programmes, it is often because they seize every available funding opportunity without always asking whether it corresponds to the domain where they can have the most impact. A government wants to launch a new programme: the NGO says yes. A disaster strikes: the NGO launches a campaign and deploys a team. The organisation is present in 120 countries but not yet in the one that a major donor is targeting: a new office is opened. Each of these decisions is understandable in isolation. Together, they describe an organisation whose strategic priorities are largely dictated by external opportunities rather than by a genuine reflection on where it can do the most good. Human and strategic resources follow the money. And when money comes from everywhere, attention is scattered in every direction.

When good programmes subsidise the bad

Even if a large NGO had a few genuinely excellent programmes within its portfolio, a structural problem remains: your donation does not go to the best programme. It enters a global budget whose average impact is pulled down by all the less effective programmes coexisting alongside the best ones. This is the same logic that applies when you split a donation between charities with very unequal results: every euro going to a less effective intervention is a euro that did not go to the most effective one. In a multi-armed NGO, this problem exists internally and permanently.

The organisation is, by construction, an average of its own programmes. And this average is lower than the effectiveness of its best programmes, meaning that a donation to these large charities is very probably less effective than a donation to charities recommended for their effectiveness by independent evaluators.

Charities that consistently obtain the best results in the eyes of independent evaluators often share a common characteristic: they do one thing, in one domain, and they do it better than most. It is this concentration that often makes both excellence in execution and precise measurement of impact possible.

Earmarked donations: the illusion of control

Faced with this reality, many donors adopt a strategy that seems intuitively sound: earmarking their donation for a specific programme. Giving to MSF "for operations in conflict zones", or to UNICEF "for vaccination in sub-Saharan Africa". The intention is good. The limitation is real.

In practice, the budgets of large organisations work like communicating vessels. If your donation fully covers the funding of a specific programme, it frees up other internal funds that will flow towards other projects you did not choose. This phenomenon is called fund fungibility. It is not fraud: it is simply how budget management works in any large organisation. In practice, an earmarked donation rarely changes the actual trajectory of money within a large charity. It creates an impression of control that the budgetary reality does not support.[2]

Neglected causes: when media visibility replaces prioritisation

Large NGOs work predominantly on highly visible causes: humanitarian crises making headlines, natural disasters covered in real time, the best-known diseases. This visibility generates significant donation flows. And it is precisely here that a central question arises: does your extra euro actually make a difference in a domain that is already very well funded?

The neglectedness of a cause is the ratio between the scale of the problem and the resources already devoted to it. A neglected cause is one where needs are immense and funding is scarce. In this context, each additional euro has far more impact than in a resource-saturated domain, where your donation is added to hundreds of millions already mobilised.

The most effective charities identified by GiveWell and the Happier Lives Institute work on problems that almost no one covers in the media: acute malnutrition in Nigeria, untreated depression in Zimbabwe, lead poisoning in millions of children across sub-Saharan Africa. These causes have no celebrity spokespersons, no television campaigns, no global awareness days trending on social media. They do not attract enough institutional donors or large-scale public funding. This is precisely what makes your donation weigh more heavily there. A euro invested in distributing bed nets in sub-Saharan Africa produces an effect that the same euro, added to the hundreds of millions already raised by a highly publicised NGO not applying principles of prioritisation, cannot structurally achieve.

Operating costs: even our instincts have been shaped by this system

Some people decide not to support large NGOs for a different reason: their communications, fundraising, or administrative expenditure seems too high. This intuition follows the same logic: judging an organisation on its internal structure rather than its real impact. It is understandable, but the research shows there is no correlation between the level of operating costs and an organisation's actual impact. What determines effectiveness is primarily the domain in which it operates and the rigour of its programme. An organisation with very low costs may very well run programmes that have never been evaluated, or whose real impact has already been studied and found to be minimal, null, or even negative.

If this reasoning leads someone to move away from a large NGO and donate to Against Malaria Foundation, the result is excellent. But the right reason is not that the NGO's costs were too high. It is that AMF is one of the most effective organisations in the world for saving lives, because it works on a neglected cause with a rigorously evaluated method. Building your donation decisions on the right foundation allows you to sustain them over time, and to avoid supporting an ineffective organisation simply because it shows low costs.

The impossibility of evaluation: a logical consequence, not an independent reason

Everything above has a direct consequence on evaluators' ability to measure these organisations' impact. The Happier Lives Institute took five years to assemble 24 comparable cost-effectiveness estimates worldwide, mobilising multiple research teams.[1] Yet according to its 2022-23 annual report, Oxfam simultaneously manages 1,036 programmes.[3] Rigorously evaluating the impact of all these programmes would take decades, and the results would already be obsolete by the time the work was done.

The impossibility of evaluating these organisations is therefore not an independent reason not to recommend them: it is the logical consequence of their failure to make prioritisation the organising principle of their structure. An organisation that chooses where it can have the most impact, and concentrates its resources on that perimeter, becomes evaluable. An organisation that expands in every direction does not. Independent evaluators cannot recommend what they cannot evaluate.

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Charities that have made the opposite choice

Against this structural problem, another model exists: charities that have made prioritisation the organising principle of everything else. A genuinely effective charity is one that knows how to say no to most of the opportunities that present themselves, in order to stay focused on the domain where it can have the most impact. This is rare discipline, difficult to maintain in the face of institutional pressures and donor expectations. But it is precisely this discipline that distinguishes the charities evaluators can recommend from those they cannot.

The programmes recommended by GiveWell or the Happier Lives Institute share one thing: a rigorous method, based on the best available evidence. Against Malaria Foundation distributes insecticide-treated bed nets in areas with a high risk of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. New Incentives provides small conditional financial incentives to families in Nigeria to increase routine childhood vaccination rates. These charities work on specific problems with methods whose effectiveness has been validated by randomised controlled trials and repeated independent evaluations.[4]

Large charities have a positive impact. They simply do not prioritise enough for that impact to be comparable, per euro spent, to the charities that evaluators recommend. And it is this difference, documented and measurable, that should guide your donations if your goal is to help as many people as possible.

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Frequently asked questions