The objective of Giving for Impact foundation is to increase the social impact of individuals and organisations that intend to make an impactful contribution to society.
Giving for Impact is responding to two major barriers for individuals and organisations to achieve maximum impact. These are 1) a lack of solid evidence on the effectiveness of interventions and 2) low awareness of the importance of using existing evidence.
Because of these barriers, donors and charitable organisations often have and use little knowledge of the effectiveness (extent to which the desired impact is achieved) of their projects. The reason for this is all too often that such evidence of the effectiveness does not exist or that givers and charitable NGOs are not aware of the existence of the evidence. Even when givers or decision-makers have access to evidence they do not necessarily factor it in their decision-making.
As a response to these barriers, the foundation aims to expand the available knowledge on the effectiveness of interventions through evaluations and to understand and influence decisions to support / implement effective interventions.
This means that Giving for Impact evaluates the impact of specific interventions about whose effectiveness little knowledge is available. In addition, Giving for Impact wants to enhance the knowledge that results from existing assessments. To this end, the foundation developed an open evidence portal of existing evaluations. Lastly, the foundation encourages experiments on ways in which decision-making of donors to make donations to effective charities can be influenced.
The latter are behavioral experiments that the foundation funds and performs itself. Behavioral experiments are studies through which – often through random ‘treatment’ under which participants perform a task – better understanding the actual behavior of people is gained. The foundation’s focus is on experiments that provide insight into donation patterns and / or behavior of policy makers. More specifically, the foundation is looking into how using knowledge of impact of projects charitable giving can be promoted.
To create a solid base of knowledge about how people can be induced to donate to effective charities we accept research proposals for experiments that study innovative mechanisms to increase donation rates for effective programs in developing countries (for examples of these: http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities).
The requirements and assessment criteria for the research proposals can be found under the ‘Research’ tab.