Charitable Giving: How Much, and to Whom?

It was getting close to the end of the Australian financial year (June 30th), and as I reviewed my financial situation I thought, “Oh! I have teh monies!! What to do with them?” So, I gave a few hundred dollars to charity.

The reasons for giving to charity are many and varied, but for me the prime drivers were: 1) the reasoning that I have more than I really ‘need’, so that giving to those with greater needs increases net wellbeing (which makes me feel good); and 2) I feel like it’s the right thing to do.

I’ve donated to causes here and there for years, but since starting full-time work I’ve put off donations because I wanted to put a bit more thought into what I was doing, namely:

 - How much should I give? and

 - To whom should I give?

To find answers to the first one, I started out with reading some of Peter Singer’s stuff, such as “The Life You Can Save” website. That gives you an easy figure of “1% of your income up to ~$100,000 of annual income, and increasing up to 5% beyond that”, but it’s a little light on the (philosophical) justification. I haven’t read the book on which the website is based, though, so maybe I’ll find more details there.

What I found more useful was the information on what charities/causes to give to. I’ve wondered for years about this: there are so many different causes out there (environmental, humanitarian, social; subsets of each (whales, forests; education, medicine; corruption, torture)) worthy of donating to, and I struggle to distinguish enough between the ‘worth’ of each to decide how to split any donation – plus, transaction costs (on the charities’ side) mean giving $1 each to 500 causes is silly.

How to pick just a single (or few) causes, then? In the end, the choice seems fairly arbitrary, but Singer’s website did recommend a list of organisations rated highly by GiveWell.org, which assess them on the basis of how transparent and effective they are. Those seem like two pretty good criteria to me, so I had a look at their list and slung some money towards Village Reach. It’s not listed as a charity in Australia, so my contribution wasn’t tax-deductible, but as I’m not paying that much tax this year that doesn’t bother me. In future years, where I can use the tax-deductibility to increase my giving, I may reassess this.

How do you decide to whom and how much you give?