Philanthropies should prefer to fund meta-issues—i.e., research and evaluation, along with efforts to improve research quality. In many cases, it would be far more impactful than what they are doing now.

This is true at two levels.

First, suppose you want to support a certain cause–economic development in Africa, or criminal justice reform in the US, etc. You could spend millions or even billions on that cause.

But let’s go meta: a force multiplier would be funding high-quality research on what works on those issues. If you invest significantly in social and behavioral science research, you might find innumerable ways to improve on the existing status quo of donations.

Instead of only helping the existing nonprofits who seek to address economic development or criminal justice reform, you’d be helping to figure out what works and what doesn’t. The result could be a much better set of investments for all donors.

Perhaps some of your initial ideas end up not working, when exhaustively researched. At worst, that’s a temporary embarrassment, but it’s actually all for the better—now you and others know to avoid wasting more money on those ideas. Perhaps some of your favored policies are indeed good ideas (e.g., vaccination), but don’t have anywhere near enough take-up by the affected populations. Social and behavioral science research (as in the Social Science Research Council’s Mercury Project) could help find cost-effective ways to solve that problem.

The same is true for the biomedical sciences as well. If you care about cancer treatment, you could easily give away substantial sums of money paying for people to access treatment. That would certainly help those people financially, and perhaps in terms of their health as well. (The median new cancer drug improves lifespan by only around two months, so good health outcomes are by no means guaranteed.)

On the other hand, you could invest in innovative cancer research. That research may or may not pay off, but if you managed to help scientists discover another drug like Gleevec (a drug that raised the five-year survival rate for chronic myelogenous leukemia from 30 percent to 89 percent), it would have much more impact on cancer than just paying for an existing treatment that isn’t very good.

But the meta-issues don’t stop there.

Suppose that you want to support academic research in a given area—be it economic development, criminal justice reform, cancer or genetics research, etc.

Read the full article about funding meta-issues by Stuart Buck and Anna Harvey at Stanford Social Innovation Review.