Should SoGive publish more notes from calls with charities?

Sanjay; SoGive

[Question]

Should SoGive publish more notes from calls with charities?

Sanjay, SoGive

1 min readMay 1, 2024

Building effective altruism

Community

SoGive

Frontpage

SoGive works with major donors.
As part of our work, we meet with several (10-30 per year) charities, generally ones recommended by evaluators we trust, or (occasionally) recommended by our own research.
We learn a lot through these conversations. This suggests that we might want to publish our call notes so that others can also learn about the charities we speak with.
Given that we take notes during the calls anyway, it might seem that it would be low cost for us to simply publish those. This would be deceptive.
- There is a non-trivial time cost for us, partly because documents which are published are held to a higher standard than those which are purely internal, but mostly because of our relationship with the charities. We want them to feel confident that they can speak openly with us. This means not only an extra step in the process (ie sharing a draft with the organisation before publishing) but also considering whether we should deliberately self-censor (i.e. avoid mentioning some relevant details if we think they are sensitive, so that we can honestly say that we're avoiding mentioning something and it's not because the charity is asking us to).
Understanding how much appetite there is for this will help us prioritise our time. In case it's helpful, spending less time on this likely means spending more time on: reviewing and understanding charities, sharing that information with donors that we work with, further developing our tools relating to moral weights, writing up more about core effective questions like give now / give later, and strategic questions like if/how to apply a worldview diversification approach.
Some previous examples are this (old) set of call notes with NTI, and this (also old) set of call notes with CATF. As can be seen from these examples, the notes simply set out what we learned in a 1-hour call, which largely focuses on better understanding what the organisation does. There often is some analytical content, but it's generally not sufficient to justify a decision to donate, which is justified on other grounds.

Comments

Sorted by

New & upvoted

No comments on this post yet.

Be the first to respond.

Comments

More from the author

102

Implications of USAID freeze on donations

Sanjay·1y ago·1m read

How to campaign about the recent UK aid cuts

Sanjay·1y ago·2m read

148

£4bn for the global poor: the UK's 0.7%

Sanjay·5y ago·3m read

Curated and popular this week

160

40 hot takes

LewisBollard·1w ago·Curated 2d ago·8m read

Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post. Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes. On factory farming 1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last lo...

167

It’s not an ache. It’s a demon from hell.

Alfredo Parra 🔸·5d ago·10m read

Impressions from the 21st Annual U.S. Cluster Headache Patient Conference, organized by Clusterbusters. On the morning of the last day of the conference, E. was hanging out with other “clusterheads” outside the conference hotel when he started having a cluster headache attack. Before he could go back to his hotel room, J. offered E. his DMT v...

How Can We Solve Animal Welfare's Evidence Problem? (Post 1)

Tom Billington, Henning Peters 🔸·1w ago·11m read

TL;DR: The movement has an evidence problem. To solve it, for each intervention we need to know: * What types of evidence that intervention needs * What types of evidence different sources can give us In this post, we outline a framework for evidencing an intervention through five stages: ...

Recent opportunities to take action

EA Organisation Updates thread: October 2026

Dane Valerie·5d ago·1m read

We’re scaling and hiring

Probably Good·1d ago·1m read

Did I rejoin Ambitious Impact at the wrong time?

Aidan Alexander, Ambitious Impact·2d ago·9m read