Charitable donations

[Jebus]

A thorough Google search didn't teach me much, apart from the third question. I am interesting in learning the following:

What percentage of all charitable donations benefit the animals?

What percentage of all charitable donations benefit the children?

What percentage of charitable donations to big charity organizations, such as the Red Cross, actually benefit the intended recipient?

and finally the most important question?

If your goal is to reduce the amount of worldwide suffering, who should be the recipient of your donations and how should you go about donating to assure that the maximum reduction of suffering is achieved?

[miniboes]

I think the first three questions are very hard to answer as depending on the size of an organisation it will have to put more money into logistics. I.e. if I start a charity now on my own I can pretty much give 100% of the money to the intended recipient, but if I expanded it to a European scale I would need to invest a lot of money into administration and such. I could also decide to put some money into marketing which indirectly benefits the intended recipient as it will generate more donations. So yeah, complicated.

On your final question, I believe the most important thing is who you do not donate to; meat and dairy industry, companies with bad working conditions in their factories, etc. That it in any case the case for animals. For humans I suppose giving to charities that try to fight terrible diseases like malaria are probably best. For example, you have this charity that provides people with bed nets that are extremely effective in fighting malaria. I can't recall the name though. Bill Gates did a really good TED talk on this issue of malaria, btw:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsgvhP07BC8

His foundation is actually also a really good one.

[brimstoneSalad]

It's easier to list the small handful of charities that are actually useful, in effective relief of suffering, than to list the ones that aren't.

This site will answer most of your questions:

http://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/

Only farm animal advocacy is really effective per dollar spent. And only leafleting is proven so.

As an alternative, you could invest your charity in biotechnology (e.g. bio-reacted meat), which is not effective now, but could be soon and needs more funding.

If you want to benefit humans, and are less worried about non-human animals, invest your charitable contributions in research technology, like organs-on-a-chip.

http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpage/293/

This also helps lab animals (eliminating vivisection), but they make up only a very small percentage of animal suffering, so if you're worried about non-human animals, farm animal advocacy is the most reasonable approach.

[Volenta]

This site will answer most of your questions:

http://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/

And for other issues, there also is this website:
http://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/

[Jebus]

[quote="brimstoneSalad"

This site will answer most of your questions:

http://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/
[/quote]

Indeed an excellent website that answers my third question perfectly.

I suspect less than one percent of all donations benefit animals, which is an example of speciesism at its very finest. I just looked at the charity list from "Celebrity Apprentice." They have gone through six seasons with 16 celebrities in each season and not one of them have picked a charity that benefits animals. In fact, more than half of these charities seems to benefit children. It's shocking when you imagine how much suffering could be reduced if half of the money donated to the "Make a wish Foundation" went to the "Humane League" or "Mercy for Animals"

[brimstoneSalad]

It's shocking when you imagine how much suffering could be reduced if half of the money donated to the "Make a wish Foundation" went to the "Humane League" or "Mercy for Animals"

It's amazing how much money goes to absolutely absurd and inefficient causes. People only care about what they can see.

People will back an indiegogo campaign to raise hundreds of thousand of dollars for an old dog's surgery and care, because they saw a video that tugged at their heart strings and they decided that was a good way to spend their money to make them feel good about themselves.

Spend a fraction of that amount on things that really make an impact, and you'll save millions more animals. You'll actually do a lot of good, rather than just feeling good about something that did very close to nothing.

Isn't is something like every hundred dollars donated to vegan outreach saves 500 animals?

[Jebus]

I'm glad this article was written because such stupidity must be addressed:

http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8723189/joh ... d-donation