In 2011, when we began what would eventually become Coefficient Giving, we set out to explore a big question: If someone had billions of dollars to give, what should they fund to make the greatest positive difference?

Previously called Open Philanthropy, we started as a partnership between Good Ventures, the foundation of Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz, and GiveWell, a nonprofit dedicated to finding and supporting evidence-backed charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar. Our goal was to expand GiveWell’s focus on cost-effectiveness beyond the areas that already had a lot of evidence, with a greater openness to cause areas beyond global health and to high-risk, high-reward opportunities.

From the beginning, our vision wasn’t just to maximize the impact of Cari and Dustin's giving, but to make the journey easier for other philanthropists who might want to follow a similar approach. We recently changed our name from Open Philanthropy to Coefficient Giving to signal our growing work with other donors. And after distributing more than $4 billion across a wide range of issues, now is an appropriate moment to reflect on some lessons we've learned about both practical tactics and philosophical approaches to doing the most good.

1. Choosing Causes Is the Most Important Decision You Can Make for Impact-Focused Giving

The problems you work on as a philanthropist determine almost everything about your work: who you hire, who your peers are, the organizations in your scope of funding, the places you work, and more. Your programs become the streetlight under which you look for the keys of your impact. But despite their nearly all-encompassing importance, many philanthropists don’t take time to consider a wide variety of problems they could address with their philanthropy; they focus instead on problems near or dear to them. This is important because just as some specific tactics can be much more effective than others, some problem spaces can have systematically more cost-effective giving opportunities than others.

Read the full article about impact-focused giving by Alexander Berger at Stanford Social Innovation Review.