Most charity evaluation measures the wrong thing
Singer's argument answers the whether question. It does not answer the how. Once I accepted that giving substantially was both morally sensible and practically required, I found myself facing a different and considerably harder problem: how do you know whether a charity is actually worth giving to?
My first instinct was to look for external validation. Charity watchdogs exist precisely for this purpose: Charity Commission filings in the UK, Charity Navigator in the US, assorted rating schemes that purport to separate responsible organisations from careless ones. What I found was a methodology built almost entirely on the wrong question.
I gave to charity for eight years before asking if it worked
In 2007, the year our first child was born, I set up a direct debit to Cancer Research UK. It felt meaningful. I had no way of knowing whether it was. That question would take me the better part of a decade to begin answering properly.
Over the years that followed, the portfolio grew the way most people's giving grows: incrementally, emotionally, and without much strategy. A colleague mentioned a charity. A news story prompted a one-off donation. Each choice felt right at the time of making. None were made on the basis of any clear idea what the money was actually achieving. This is, I suspect, how most people give. The intention is genuine. The method is essentially nonexistent.
What changed things was a single short essay, written in 1972, that I heard mentioned on a podcast at roughly the right point in my life.