We report donations that were made via our Donation page. For these donations, we are confident that we influenced the donor’s choice of the recipient organization. In some cases, we also report donations that were not made via our website if we have been in personal contact with a donor who then made their donation directly to one of our recommended charities. Before reporting these donations we verify that the organization did indeed receive the donation. If these happen to be very large donations, we consider to what extent the donation would have been made without our advice, and whether it would have been made to one of our recommended charities. We then only report the amount we estimate we have influenced.

We often cite our fundraising multiplier (previously referred to as: “fund ratio”) as a measure of our effectiveness. But we think it’s important to acknowledge that alone, this metric isn’t complete. First, the fundraising multiplier should not be taken as a measure for our overall impact. That is best approximated by the money we have moved to effective charities minus our expenses. Second, even as a measure of effectiveness the fundraising multiplier can be ambiguous because:

  1. It only takes into account past performance which means it can only ever be an imperfect proxy for future performance. This is especially important for organizations in early stages or which are undergoing strategic shifts.
  2. A broad measure such as the fundraising multiplier lumps together donations benefiting different cause areas and charities. This means it doesn’t capture the differential effectiveness of organizations that our donors might care about.
  3. Sometimes there might be good reasons to accept a lower fundraising multiplier in order to have a bigger impact in the future. It would create harmful incentives if such developments were penalized by donors.

The fundraising multiplier should never be taken as the only measure to assess a fundraising strategy but it can be a useful component when comparing different charities.

We are partly funded by the Effective Altruism Foundation but also rely on your continued support for our work. If you are interested in funding REG, simply use our Donate page.

 
If we don’t answer your questions here, please get in touch with us at info@reg-charity.org.