Support Top Charities with Ed & Ann’s “Best Things First” Foundation

Have you ever wondered how much your donation really helps the poor? Or how much it really helps find cures?

Which charities help the poor the most for each dollar donated?

You can now donate to the most cost-effective charities in the world with Ed & Ann’s charitable foundation “Best Things First”.

In my latest video, podcast episode, and blog post you’ll learn:

• How did Ed & Ann get started looking for cost-effective charities?
• Why is a cost-effective charity important?
• How did they learn about GiveWell?
• Why did Ed & Ann create a foundation?
• How can you support the world’s top charities?

How did Ed & Ann get started looking for cost-effective charities?

For many years, we donated like most people do. Small amounts to a few causes we could identify with and a few to get rid of a telemarketer. It did not give us a warm feeling.

I often wondered how much our donations really helped anyone. The only way I could think to identify more effective charities was by looking up how much overhead they have. However, I realized that is not the same as doing something effective in the world.

Many years ago, the owner of a company I worked for was constantly asked for donations. He donated if the person asking was a volunteer, but not to all the ones that used a marketing company. Not a bad idea.

A few years ago, I read about having a “Donation Plan”. Decide at the beginning of the year a short list of causes that are important to us and donate a lot more to them. Then say no to all the telemarketers. That felt so much more effective for us.

Incidentally, our largest donations were to the Princess Margaret run for cancer. We did not know back then that would be actually where and how Ann passed away.

I constantly read books and came across “Best Things First” by Bjorn Lomborg. It was a huge eyeopener! It is the first time I saw someone using rigorous analysis to try to identify which causes produced the biggest benefit per dollar donated. As a finance guy, a light bulb went on.

He collaborated with over 100 economists through the Copenhagen Consensus Center to identify 12 high-impact policies based on rigorous cost-benefit analysis. They looked at the most important causes to figure out the best possible method to help and then estimated the benefit per dollar. He calls them the “Doable Dozen”:

“In total, politicians could set aside just $35 billion a year — a rounding error in most global negotiations — to deliver immense benefits: implementing these 12 policies would save 4.2 million lives annually and make the poorer half of the world more than $1 trillion better off every year. On average, a dollar invested would deliver an astounding $52 of social benefits.”

Why is a cost-effective charity important?

We have a limited amount of money and there is infinite need. Thousands of charities.

Lomborg says the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals try to promise everything to everyone, so they are far behind.

He proposes prioritizing interventions like combating malaria with bed nets, malnutrition with supplements, improving childhood immunization, and enhancing education in poor countries with shared tablets. These policies, detailed in peer-reviewed studies, are estimated to yield at least $15 in benefits for every dollar spent, with some delivering up to $52.

A benefit of 50 times our donation!

As an example of cost effectiveness, millions of people still die from chronic diseases like malaria and tuberculosis in poor countries, even though we know how to treat and prevent them. Tuberculosis is more serious and kills more people, but is less cost-effective to solve than malaria. It requires daily medication for 6 months that usually requires a medical person. If you don’t finish, it tends to relapse and be worse. Many poor people have trouble committing to going to the doctor every single day for 6 months.

Malaria can be reduced a lot just by providing bed nets with insecticide. An inexpensive gift every 2-3 years can save hundreds of thousands of lives.

In other words, priority should not be to the most severe causes, but to the ones where each dollar makes the biggest difference.

How did they learn about GiveWell?

I think this is an amazing idea, but how can we do it in practice?

I wrote to Bjorn Lomborg and asked him what charities in Canada that would be the most cost-effective. He actually wrote back and said GiveWell or the Against Malaria Foundation.

I found GiveWell is exactly what I am looking for. They are a research charity that identifies cost-effective charities. Fully transparent, a large research team, and their Top Charities Fund has no overhead at all. They get separate donations for their operations.

They go a step further to see which of the top charities have an immediate funding need or donation shortage to use new donations effectively.

Here is the result of some of GiveWell’s research:

The problem is that GiveWell is a US charity, not a Canadian charity.

The Against Malaria Foundation is registered in Canada and is one of their Top Charities now, but I prefer on-going research to continually identify the Top Charities at any point in time.

The concept of finding the world’s best appeals to me. I invest with a portfolio manager that tries to find All Star Managers – the world’s best investors. Donating to the world’s Top Charities is a perfect fit.

I know the people at Charitable Impact, which is the registered charity for our foundation. I even recently interviewed their founder, John Bromley. I asked him how to find a Canadian charity that supports the international causes we want. They were able to find a charity called RC Forward in Canada that donates to the top 4 charities from GiveWell.

That’s great. It allows us to donate to GiveWell’s Top Charities and still get our donation tax credit in Canada.

GiveWell also has another fund that they believe is even more effective, but they are less confident in the effectiveness. It is called their All Grants Fund. It is a wider variety of causes with an expected higher impact, but there is less research to support it. A likely even higher benefit sounds good. There is not a method to donate to it in Canada yet, but I plan to keep working on it.

This entire process is a work-in-progress to find the most cost-effective charities for our limited donation dollars.

Why did Ed & Ann create a foundation?

A charitable foundation allows us to contribute now without having to give it all away immediately. It also allows us to accumulate a larger fund to provide ongoing funding for Top Charities.

After we started our foundation, I posted about the idea last year: The Ultimate Status Symbol & Making a Difference in the World.

Many charities prefer ongoing funding to one large donation. Getting funding every year means they can create a long-term ongoing program that can provide larger benefits.

I have seen the benefits of investing to grow a much larger portfolio over time for retirement planning. With our foundation, we plan to make large donations every year and then invest it for long-term growth. Then we can donate 4-5% of it every year to provide on-going funding to the Top Charities.

I also learned about How to Donate 10 Times More with the Donation Flow-Through Strategy. It’s complex, but it works and allows us to build our foundation more quickly.

To be clear, the foundation is not my money. I cannot access it. I can direct how it is invested and who it is donated to, but the money can only be used to donate to registered Canadian charities.

We named our foundation after the book that inspired it and our purpose, “Best Things First”.

How can you support the world’s top charities?

After my interview with John Bromley last month, I learned how to create a Giving Group so anyone can donate to our foundation and get their tax receipt immediately from Charitable Impact.

The timing is fortunate, in retrospect. After my beloved wife, Ann Hetram, passed away unexpectedly last month, I was worried people would send me flowers. I’m not really a flowers guy. What would I do with a bunch of bouquets?

In lieu of sending me flowers, I would prefer a donation to a cost-effective charity or to our foundation “Best Things First”.

Details here: https://link.charitableimpact.com/eZdtsqQ8gSb .

You can donate in the secure portal to the “Best Things First” charitable foundation here:

If you have been wondering how much your donations really help the poor, our foundation is a method for you to donate to the most cost-effective Top Charities. 

Ed