Good Giving List: Amber among only seven UK charities chosen.

Amber has been included in the Good Giving List the UK’s first thoroughly vetted list of effective charities operating in the country.

The Good Giving List recommends charities who run programmes, which have been shown by rigorous and independent evidence to succeed. This reassures donors’ their hard-earned donations improve lives.

This project is the brainchild of Giving Evidence an independent research and advisory organisation that specialises in philanthropy.

Caroline Fiennes, Director, Giving Evidence:

“When savvy financial investors make investment decisions, they use independent assessments of companies’ performance and prospects. However, this sort of information is very hard to find about charities.

Until now! We reviewed hundreds of independent evaluations of social programmes so that you don’t have to! Giving Evidence created The Good Giving List so that any donor can easily find charities, which succeed so they can support confidently. The recommended charities are hidden gems: not household names, but nonetheless proven to deliver results.”

The Good Giving List launches in time for Giving Tuesday (28th November), and in time for the Christmas giving season.

How does the Good Giving List choose charities to recommend?

Producing rigorous research into the effectiveness of charities’ programmes can be prohibitively expensive. This is why nobody has produced such a list before. The clever part here is that Giving Evidence uses existing research by various independent organisations, which rigorously assess the effectiveness of social programmes. By analysing that research, they identify charities that run programmes, which work. Finally, they run some checks on those charities, e.g., that their financials are sound.

These independent research organisations include the ‘Data Lab’ in the UK Ministry of Justice, and several “what works centres”: some of which are funded and founded by the UK Government and loosely modelled on NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence).

Consequently, donors can be confident that charities recommended are stable, and run programmes, which have been shown to be effective in recent and rigorous evaluations.

The Good Giving List recommends charities only in sectors where it can find suitable research organisations – which produce rigorous and independent evaluations of programmes’ achievements. At launch, the Good Giving List has recommendations in three sectors: education, children and families, and reducing crime.

All the charities are profiled on their website which also provides links to donate to each recommended charity.

Giving Evidence aims expand the list to cover more sectors and include more charities over time.