I gave to charity for eight years before asking if it worked

This is post 1 of 5 of the Giving with intention series

In 2007, the year our first child was born, I set up a standing order to Cancer Research UK. Cancer had appeared in my family, which gave the choice a vague rationale, but beyond that I had no particular reason to choose it over anything else. Neither my family nor my wife's had any tradition of organised giving, no inherited framework for where charitable money should go or why. What we had was a new baby, and with it came a sudden and unfamiliar feeling of obligation. The charity felt serious. A safe, credible bet. The direct debit at the time was £25 a month. It felt meaningful, but I had no way of knowing whether it was.

That question, it turned out, would take me the better part of a decade to begin answering properly. The ten years since have been spent on little else.

On instinct

Becoming a parent changes the way you look at the world in ways that are difficult to predict in advance. I tend to think of myself as a fairly rational person, someone who works things through before acting, but becoming a parent altered my priorities in ways I had not anticipated. I started to notice things I had not paid attention to before. One of those changes was a sharp and immediate consciousness of scale and of responsibility. I had brought a child into a world with a great deal in it that was wrong, a great deal of suffering that was preventable, and a great deal of complacency from people, including myself, who had the means to do something about it but had not done much.

I did not think about this in those terms at the time. What I felt, more precisely, was that it would be dishonest not to act on it in some way. The Cancer Research direct debit was the path of least resistance.

Over the following years, the portfolio grew in the way that most people's charitable giving grows: incrementally, emotionally, and without much strategy. A colleague mentioned a charity. A news story prompted a one-off donation. A direct debit to a second organisation appeared, then a third. Each choice felt right at the time of making. None of them were made on the basis of any clear idea about what the charity was actually achieving with the money.

This is, I suspect, how most people give. The intention is genuine. The method is essentially nonexistent.

On not asking the right question

For a while, not asking felt acceptable. I was giving, which was more than most people around me were doing. The charities I supported were credible, respected, and well-known. Surely the money was going somewhere good. That was the assumption: I had no hard evidence for it, and I was not actively looking for any.

What broke the assumption was not a single dramatic moment. It was a short essay, written in 1972 by a philosopher named Peter Singer, that I heard mentioned on a podcast at roughly the right point in my life. The argument Singer makes is simple enough to state in a sentence: if you can prevent something very bad from happening at no comparable cost to yourself, you are obligated to do it. He illustrates this with the image of a child drowning in a shallow pond. You would not walk past the child to protect your shoes. The fact that the child is a stranger, or that others are nearby who could also help, does not change your obligation.

The argument is discomfiting in proportion to how seriously you take it. I took it seriously enough to sit with it for a while, and over time, it changed something in my thinking. It did not reassure me that what I was doing was sufficient. If anything, it pointed firmly in the opposite direction.

But Singer's argument answers the whether question. It does not answer the how.

The question that followed

Once I accepted that giving substantially was both morally defensible and practically possible, the next question became more technical and considerably harder. If I was going to give, what should I be trying to achieve? How would I know whether I was achieving it? And were some ways of giving dramatically more effective than others?

The answer to the last question, I discovered, is: yes, by orders of magnitude.

This is where the Effective Altruism movement enters the picture, to which Singer is a philosophical forefather. At its most basic, it is a framework for trying to do as much good as possible with whatever resources you commit to giving. It takes seriously the idea that not all charitable giving is equivalent, that the difference between a well-evaluated intervention and a poorly-evaluated one can be the difference between genuinely helping and spending money on good intentions with negligible effect, and that the question "What works?" is both answerable and worth asking before writing a cheque.

For me, that shift in thinking happened roughly ten years ago. The direct debit to Cancer Research UK had been running for the better part of a decade by that point, and I had never once asked what it was achieving. When I started asking, seriously and with effort, the answers were complicated. They changed how I thought about the rest of my giving, and they set off a process of rebuilding the whole approach from the ground up. That process is still running.

Where this series goes

This post is the start of a short series. Over the next four instalments, I want to do something I have not attempted publicly before: document how I actually think about giving now, what framework I use to evaluate charities, how I have structured my giving across cause areas, and what my giving portfolio looks like in concrete terms.

These posts are not advocacy. They are an attempt to document the thinking, show practical examples, and perhaps start a conversation, or prompt someone reading this to act. I have spent a decade building a view on this, and it is worth showing the working.

The question that runs through all of it: if effectiveness can be measured, and it can, at least imperfectly, what does it mean to give without measuring it?

That is where the next post starts.