GiveList

Better Giving Studio developed this concept during a product sprint which focused on leveraging giving research and translating it into high level product concepts. 

The Opportunity

With over a million public charities operating in the US, donors report being overwhelmed by information and solicitations from the nonprofit sector. The presence of too many, seemingly similar options can result in users making suboptimal decisions, or even failing to make a choice at all. This behavior is known as choice overload. Furthermore, the sector lacks consistent impact measurement across organizations and cause areas to help donors feel confident that their contributions will be used effectively.

GiveList leverages the due diligence and experience of well-respected philanthropists to create curated lists of effective charities. These offerings, dubbed ‘GiveLists,’ would help surface the most effective organizations for donors to consider, and give donors more confidence that gifts to those charities would be well-utilized.

The Concept

While 85% of donors say they care about the effectiveness of a charity, only 9% actually do the work of comparing the relative performance of potential donations. GiveLists do that work for donors. Each GiveList highlights expert-selected charities that are effective within a specific cause area. Surfacing a curated list reduces the user’s need to scroll through and compare results on their own. 

On the GiveList Platform, a user could search for charities by cause area. For instance: education. This would surface an effective GiveList of education charities, curated by a specific philanthropist. The user could click to learn more about the curator, and why they chose the charities on their GiveList. They could then view the list of charities and  choose to make one donation that’s distributed equally across all charities on the list, or donate specific amounts only to those that interest them the most. They could also save charities they may donate to at a later time.

The signal of approval from a credible expert imparts credibility to the organizations on the GiveList, and validates a donor’s decision to make a donation. For instance, one study of the effects of matching donations found that having the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation be the visible matching partner increased donation rates by 38% and donation volume by 44% compared to an unspecified match partner. Another study found the average donation amount for users who were shown an expert list was more than double that of those who saw a list with an unnamed curator.

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