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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Before There Was Effective Altruism, There Was Effective Philanthropy, published by ColdButtonIssues on June 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Cross-posted from Cold Button Issues. Some charities and donors spend a lot of money and mean well but fail to truly help anyone. What are the best things for philanthropically minded people to do and how can they constantly improve? Wouldn’t it be great if somebody tried to solve the problem and maybe even find a way to rate the most influential nonprofits? That was (and is) the goal of the effective philanthropy movement. This movement predated effective altruism by over a decade and anticipated some early effective altruism claims, but by now has been eclipsed in the public consciousness by the latter movement. Google Trends for effective philanthropy (blue) and effective altruism (red) Yet in terms of donations driven or “money moved,” effective philanthropy has arguably outperformed effective altruism in the last several years, despite its low profile. How? What Is Effective Philanthropy? The book on effective philanthropy says that effective philanthropy is “philanthropy that has impact. It is philanthropy that succeeds at amassing, managing, then allocating financial and human resources in ways that have the greatest positive impact in the sectors that foundations choose to fund.” In a more practical sense, effective philanthropy consists of a few institutions, some writers and thinkers, and a lot of sympathetic foundations. The Center for Effective Philanthropy, run by Phil Buchanan and founded in 2000, is the big player here and receives funding from long established foundations such as the Hewlett Foundation, the Duke Endowment, and the Wallace Foundation. Buchanan is probably the central figure in effective philanthropy, serving as CEP’s first executive director, writing a book on the topic, and hosting a related podcast. There’s also the twenty-year old Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, which is a coalition of philanthropic funders interested in sharing best practices and has members from every type of philanthropy you can think of. The Hewlett Foundation also funds an effective philanthropy program. The Center for Effective Philanthropy, like GiveWell would later do, wanted to know which nonprofits were doing a better job than others. And it didn’t want to obsess over administrative overhead or executive pay or simple but misleading measures. It wanted to know which nonprofits were actually fulfilling their function. Focusing on grantmakers, their approach was to evaluate how well grantmakers were doing by surveying their grantees. And because there is actually a lot of demand for CEP’s surveys, foundations and other grantmakers are able to compare their performance to their peers. Grantees are asked a variety of questions about the quality of their funders along various dimensions- general performance, do they advance the state of the knowledge in their field, did they treat their grantees fairly and so on. (Example report) CEP also offers similar surveys for foundation and grantmaker staff. This methodology can be used across a field and so hundreds of grantmakers across different causes have chosen to use CEP’s services. Their approach had a couple of big differences from GiveWell and the other EA charity evaluators. First, it was less rigorous. The information was useful and effective philanthropy enthusiasts are happy to praise RCTs, but the approach wasn’t about building detailed spreadsheets and comparing moral weights of different goods. That said I’m sympathetic to CEP’s approach, especially in fields like advocacy or more speculative causes where even effective altruists who focus very strongly about the question seem unsure how to rate different causes and programs. Second, effective phil...