Judging by my inbox, there seems to be huge demand for advice about which charities to support. As donors have followed the turmoil around Oxfam, Save the Children, Kids Company and others before them, they want decent independent analysis along the lines of the data that rating agencies provide for bonds or Which? does for fridges.

There isn’t any.

Establishing whether a charity is effective means establishing whether its work results in some useful change in the world which would not have happened otherwise. That relies on two factors. First, the quality of its intervention or programme; and second, how well that intervention is implemented. Both need to be good.

Assessing an intervention is hard. It requires distinguishing the effect of the programme itself from that of other factors, such as the passage of time, random chance, general changes in society, and atypical characteristics in the people who seek the charity’s help.

The interventions run by many charities — and indeed by other entities such as governments — simply haven’t been evaluated well enough to pinpoint their effects.The coverage of social science research on the types of programmes that charities run has been limited to date: extending it is largely a function of funding.

In the absence of independent analysis, the common fallback is to trust the self-evaluations which charities routinely produce. In this system, the charity produces research material on which it will be judged and existential decisions about its lifeblood funding will be made. What could possibly go wrong?

Thus for many charities — perhaps most — nobody knows how effective they are.

When people offer to pay me to tell them which charities are best, in general, I don’t do it, because I don’t know. Neither does anyone else: the data just don’t exist.

Read the full article about data on charity analysis at Giving Evidence.