This giving season, give with your heart and your head

There’s no right way to give to charities, but there’s a better way.

JJ Gouin/Adobe

If, like most Americans, you’re planning to donate to charity this holiday season, you may be facing a moral dilemma: Should you give with your heart or your head?

Some say giving only with the head — choosing charities backed by expert research — is misguided. Last year, an op-ed in this newspaper criticized this approach as giving “no weight to emotional or personal connections” and “trying to wrench the heart out of charitable giving.”

We understand. Donating to charity can be deeply meaningful — much more so than mundane spending decisions like picking out the right shampoo. But while being heartless is certainly not the goal, it’s also important to be deliberate about where your hard-earned charitable dollar goes.

Giving to top-rated charities is especially worthwhile because they can be astoundingly impactful. You might think that top charities deliver something like 50 percent more benefit than others; in fact, they can yield more than 100 times the impact. For example, it costs about $50,000 to provide a guide dog to a blind person in the United States. By contrast, a surgery that prevents blindness from trachoma, a contagious bacterial infection common in tropical climates, can cost less than $50. Although it may be beneficial to support charities accomplishing both ends, the trachoma surgery can help many more people with the same amount of money.

Our message isn’t to tell you to stop giving to the nonprofits that you love, like the local animal shelter where you adopted your dog or a cancer research center in honor of a loved one. Neither is our message that you should plan all your giving according to expert calculations and support only those charities that offer the most bang for your philanthropic buck.

Instead, we recommend that you give with your heart and your head. Split your year-end donations between charities that are meaningful to you and ones that stretch your dollar further. Research by coauthor Greene and Lucius Caviola, a moral psychologist at the University of Oxford, shows that most of us like the idea of splitting donations between a personal favorite charity and a super-effective one. We like it even more when our donations are boosted with matching funds.

This inspired us to create GivingMultiplier.org, a platform that helps donors divide their donations between any US-registered nonprofit that means a lot to them and others recommended by experts. Donations are then boosted by matching funds across all selections. Since 2020, we’ve raised more than $3.7 million, supporting super-effective charities plus more than 2,000 others beloved by our donors. Some donors, we have found, are willing to pay it forward by providing matching funds for future donors.

This pragmatic approach is like designing a diet that you can stick to, balancing what your head knows about what you should be eating with what your body craves. This approach works better than aiming for a physiologically optimal diet, replete with sardines and kale and nothing you love.

This year we’ll support the charities recommended by the supremely diligent research team at GiveWell. These include Malaria Consortium, which reduces child mortality from malaria by distributing treatments that cost $7 each, and Helen Keller International, which reduces the risk of blindness and death in children with vitamin A supplements costing less than $2 per child.

Following the advice of Animal Charity Evaluators, we’ll pay to mitigate the cruelty of factory farming by supporting the Humane League and the Good Food Institute. We’ll support GiveDirectly, which sends unrestricted cash, allowing recipients to decide how to spend what’s donated. We’ll contribute to the Clean Air Task Force, recommended by Founders Pledge, which works on scalable solutions for climate change. And the charities we give to through our respective personal giving will promote nearby public schools, pediatric cancer research, and local Ultimate Frisbee — none of which are praised by charity experts for their cost-effectiveness but that feel good to support.

You don’t need to use our tool to follow our advice. The key idea is to relieve the tension between heart and head — without burying your head in the sand. Insisting on perfection is foolish. But it’s equally foolish to ignore what we’ve learned about how to improve and save more lives.

Matthew Coleman is the executive director of Giving Multiplier and a researcher at Harvard University.

Joshua Greene is a professor of psychology at Harvard University, cofounder of Giving Multiplier, and the author of “Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.”