2016 ANNUAL REPORT

Hailey Tucker/One Acre Fund 2016 ANNUAL REPORT A LETTER FROM OUR EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

A letter from our Executive Director

Dear Subscribers and Followers of The Life You Can Save,

Our 2016 Annual Report chronicles our ongoing growth, which would not be possible without our talented core Team and our skilled volunteers. I ...for every $1 we spent, am indebted to Jon Behar, our Chief Operating Officer, for his highly skilled we raised about $9 efforts to track and understand all the for our Recommended numbers that went into this report. Nor Nonprofits. would it be possible without all of you who have generously donated to our Recommended Nonprofits, as well as those who have financially supported TLYCS itself over the past few years. Finally, and perhaps most of all, I want And last, but certainly not least, we are to thank the women and men who work indebted to for his ongoing with all eighteen of our Recommended advocacy on behalf of the global poor Nonprofits throughout the world. Your and his enthusiasm for and help with the expertise, creativity and perseverance, development of The Life You Can Save along with your commitment to evidence as an organization. and effectiveness, help to mitigate the many injustices that people are In completing my fourth year as volunteer subjected to simply as a function of Executive Director, I feel comfortable where they are born. with our cumulative accomplishments and with the results reported here for We are looking forward to a great 2017 2016. However, our goal is to have a and your continued support. much greater impact in helping our Recommended Nonprofits reduce Good giving and good living! needless suffering and premature death among the global poor. Our 2017 Strategic Plan outlines where we want to go from here and how we plan to achieve Charlie Bresler our desired greater impact.

2 3 Hannah McCandless/Village Enterprise 2016 ANNUAL REPORT THE2016: ENORMOUS THE YEAR OPPORTUNITY IN NUMBERS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 2016 THE YEAR IN NUMBERS This Annual Report describes The Life You Can Save’s work and its impact over In 2016, The Life You Can Save saw strong growth in all our key metrics. the course of 2016. Highlights of our results were: Here are the numbers we look at, and why.

How it How it’s Why it We moved $2.7 million to our Recommended Metric Number compares calculated matters Nonprofits in 2016, while spending ~$300,000 to 2015 on our operating expenses. This means that for every $1 we spent, we raised about $9 for our Tracked donations Recommended Nonprofits. Total to top charities, The money we Money $2.7MM with missing data raised for our top Moved conservatively charities 72% estimated

Growth was strong in key metrics. Total Money Moved was up 72% relative to 2015, while our Total Money Net funds raised Moved minus Net Impact (Money Moved net of expenses) Net for effective Operating $2.4MM charities due to increased by 86%. Impact Expenses our work 86% ($300,000)

Our “bang for We made significant progress in developing Total Money the buck”: the Leverage Moved divided working relationships with value-aligned groups amount by which 9x by operating Factor we multiply each and individuals. These sorts of partnerships Expenses 63% dollar we spend amplify our reach and expertise, and are an essential part of our plan to scale. To support our future growth, we made major enhancements to Total Money Money moved Moved plus gifts Broad measure through GiveWell our infrastructure: we overhauled our donation Money made by GiveWell of donations to assumed to be process, codified and strengthened our Influenced $16MM donors referred effective charities the same as in by TLYCS/Peter that we influence 2015, 2016 data selection process, and upgraded our donor Singer not yet available stewardship process.

Web Total website The organic reach Traffic 394,800 sessions, ex of our primary (unpaid) Google Adwords (public) face 45% SUPPORT OUR WORK 

4 5 2016 ANNUAL REPORT HOW THE NUMBERS INFORM STRATEGY... AND HOW THEY DON’T

How the numbers increasing bang for the buck

inform our strategy… 10 and how they don’t 8 6

Our goal is to move as much money to our operating expenses from our Money 4 effective nonprofits as possible while Moved, while our Leverage Factor 2 spending as little as possible, both over expresses these numbers as a benefit/ the long run. Two of our metrics reflect cost ratio. Both these metrics grew 0 this relationship between our benefits significantly in 2016, continuing our long- 2014 2015 2016 and our costs: Net Impact subtracts term trends.

Net Impact is conceptually our most our Leverage Factor decline over time if MONEY MOVED vs OPERATING EXPENSES important metric, as it represents the that change were driven by a dramatic money that will go to help people in expansion of our total impact. extreme because of our work. If 3,000,000 The Life You Can Save didn’t exist, our While our other metrics don’t incorporate Recommended Nonprofits would receive the cost of our operations, they provide 2,500,000 none of the money we raise, but they’d valuable perspectives: 2,000,000 likely get the vast majority of the money Total Money Moved includes all the used to fund our operational expenses[1]. donations we are highly confident we 1,500,000 Net Impact captures this dynamic. directly influenced. We believe this metric 1,000,000 We also want to ensure that we’re is a conservative representation of our 500,000 delivering significant bang for the buck, impact, as our measurement fails to which our Leverage Factor measures. capture some donations we know are 0 occurring.[2] 2014 2015 2016 When we’re considering whether a specific opportunity meets this threshold, we make the evaluation on a sliding scale. Operating Expenses Net Impact Total Money Moved The higher the potential Net Impact, the more we’re willing to tolerate a lower Leverage Factor. This is a critical subtlety, ...many traditional marketing as we believe some opportunities that channels (TV ads, print ads, offer only moderate leverage have the greatest potential to scale. For instance, digital marketing) could many traditional marketing channels (TV potentially be used to steer ads, print ads, digital marketing) could vast sums of money toward potentially be used to steer vast sums effective nonprofits. of money toward effective nonprofits, but at a much lower multiplier than less scalable forms of outreach. So somewhat counterintuitively, we’d actually like to see 6 7

Against Foundation Against Malaria Foundation 2016 ANNUAL REPORT HOW THE NUMBERS INFORM STRATEGY... AND HOW THEY DON’T

Money Influenced is a broader measure of our impact. It includes money given to effective nonprofits through GiveWell by donors who were referred there by The Life You Can Save or Peter Singer. ...much of our effort in We know we played a role in these donations, but we’re not sure how big a 2016 was spent making role that is. Therefore, we’ve chosen to progress that doesn’t exclude these gifts from the majority of show up in our metrics. our metrics. However, we view amplifying GiveWell’s work as a great opportunity to still make an impact, so we use Money Influenced to track this perspective.

Core Money Moved and Web Traffic short-term metrics or even short- each measure key intermediate outcomes term growth. Doing so would lead us that will drive our long-run success. to systematically forego opportunities These metrics help us understand critical to make short-term investments with components of our strategy, and provide significant long-term rewards. warning if signs of problems emerge. In fact, these are precisely the sorts of As valuable as we find this collection investments we believe will fuel our long- of metrics, they all share the same run impact. Our Giving Game Project is a problem: they tell us where we are and great example. In it, we run philanthropy where we’ve been, but not where we’re education workshops, primarily with going. Recall that our goal is to maximize university students. Teaching this our long-term impact. As a young and audience about effective philanthropy growing nonprofit, most of that impact offers the opportunity to influence an will take place in the future. Since all of entire lifetime of giving. To learn more our metrics are backward-looking, they about the benefits of this work, which neglect the future entirely. don’t show up in our metrics, we invite One way we mitigate this issue is by you to read The Giving Game Project’s focusing more on growth rates (both Annual Report. short and long-term) than on the As you’ll see in our review of the year’s absolute levels of our metrics. Looking at highlights, much of our effort in 2016 our trajectory lets us extrapolate into the was spent making progress that doesn’t future. show up in our metrics, while those 2016 More fundamentally, we don’t make numbers partially reflect groundwork laid decisions with an aim toward maximizing in the past.

8 9 Hailey Tucker/One Acre Fund 2016 ANNUAL REPORT HIGHLIGHTS OF 2016

HIGHLIGHTS OF 2016

Partnerships and infrastructure were leadership spent a day meeting with key areas of focus throughout the year, a consortium of academics from as we view these as critical to our long- local institutions. These researchers term growth strategy. We saw excellent study giving behavior and aim to find progress on both fronts. interventions that will make people more likely to give to effective nonprofits. The Partnerships day was spent brainstorming and laying the groundwork for future collaboration. You’re probably familiar with one partner Many of our new partners have joined our in particular, as he’s a household name. advisory board, and we’ve already begun We’re honored to thank the legendary experimentation. musician Paul Simon for performing at our benefit concert. The event was Our collaboration with MediaMath, a hosted by our generous supporters Julie leading digital marketing firm, is a great Our founder Peter Singer with Paul Simon at our and Carlo Panaccione, and guests were example of the corporate partnerships October benefit concert. treated to a magical and unique musical we’re developing. MediaMath experience. The concert proceeds will approached us with a generous offer to provide much of The Life You Can Save’s donate their expertise and funding to operational funding for 2017 and many run a marketing campaign on behalf of attendees became new supporters of our an effective charity. Their belief, which organization. we strongly share, is that nonprofits can benefit from investing in marketing In October, our founder Peter Singer the same way for-profit organizations gave a keynote speech at a behavioral do. We connected MediaMath with ethics symposium at Harvard University. GiveDirectly, and they collaboratively Afterwards, The Life You Can Save’s designed a campaign which ran during giving season. GiveDirectly conservatively estimates that these ads generated $175,000 in donations. This collaboration One for the World’s also produced valuable data on which types of ads worked best; we’ll use this goal is to expand information to guide future marketing globally, influencing efforts. thousands of students to practice conscious and We’ve partnered with One for the World, a like-minded organization founded at thoughtful giving. the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, to become their fiscal sponsor. This means that officially, One for the World is now part of The Life

10 Fred Hollows 11 Foundation 2016 ANNUAL REPORT HIGHLIGHTS OF 2016

You Can Save, though they’ll operate data is a crucial foundation for our long- independently. Their goal is to expand term plan to provide a customized world- around the world, influencing thousands class user experience for our audience. of students to practice conscious and Our vision is to provide donors the ability thoughtful giving in order to increase to track their giving, receive personalized money raised for effective nonprofits in the feedback on the impact of their gifts, and most efficient manner possible. They plan set and track their goals. By tailoring our to reach 100 schools and raise millions of audience communications based on their dollars per year by 2021. They share our giving history, we expect to significantly Panel of Experts and are already raising improve both our value proposition and money for our Recommended Nonprofits. our impact. We anticipate natural synergies with The Giving Game Project and other areas as To take advantage of the new information One for the World pursues its aggressive we’re capturing, we’ve been building out expansion plans. our technical infrastructure. This includes building pipelines that route all the data We have other, potentially transformative, we need to the same place and designing partnerships in the pipeline. These tools that make it easy for us to see opportunities have grown in tandem with important information. Better information the more quantitative metrics discussed allows us to make better decisions, based above, and adding capacity in partnership on sound evidence. In this spirit, we’ve development is our priority as we look to built dashboards and designed monitoring expand our lean team. processes that allow us to track key numbers in close to real time. These Infrastructure dashboards help us keep accurate track of our progress, while also alerting us if In late May, we began processing problems emerge in particular areas. donations directly through our site using the Network for Good giving platform. We’re already reaping the benefits of some In the short-term, this change provides of these improvements. By integrating a dramatic improvement to our user our donation process with our website experience (for instance, allowing donors analytics, we’ve significantly upgraded to give to multiple nonprofits in a single the precision with which we understand transaction or to run a peer-to-peer the drivers of our audience’s giving. For fundraiser) and allows us to more precisely instance, we can now track donations track the donations we influence. In the attributable to a specific landing page on long-term, even greater benefits will come our site, referral traffic from a particular from the additional information we’re now media mention, or contributions from a able to capture. In the past, when people specific geographic area. And we’ve also donated through our nonprofits’ websites added sophistication to our audience rather than our own, it severely limited communications by developing tools that both our knowledge about our audience allow us to personalize messaging based and our ability to communicate with them. on increasingly complex logic.

Having access to this granular donation Not all the infrastructure we built

12 13 Oxfam 2016 ANNUAL REPORT Our Panel of Experts

was technical in nature. Our list of the rationale behind it, but the takeaway is has been quoted on charitable giving Recommended Nonprofits underlies most that our charity selection is more reliable, in publications such as The New York of our work, and throughout the year we systematic, and transparent than ever. Times, Chronicle of Philanthropy, USA worked on shoring up this foundation. Today, Forbes, Los Angeles Times, and The benefits of selecting nonprofits in a The result was our new charity selection the CFA Institute’s Enterprising Investor. process, which was announced at the smarter way are significant: it means our beginning of giving season. donors can give with more impact and Professionally, Eric is an actuary and more confidence. A hidden benefit of this investment consultant. He holds the This new process transitions responsibility change is that it allows our lean team to designations of Fellow of the Society of for our recommendations to a Panel of focus on other priorities. By utilizing the Actuaries (FSA), Enrolled Actuary (EA), Experts we’ve formed--including leaders in charity evaluation expertise of outside ERIC FRIEDMAN and Charter Financial Analyst (CFA). He economics, ethics, nonprofit management, organizations and individuals, our core graduated from Stanford University with and business--which will leverage the best staff can concentrate on raising money for majors in mathematics and economics. charity evaluation research available. We outstanding nonprofits and growing the Eric Friedman is author of the book hope you’ll take some time to learn more effective giving community. Reinventing Philanthropy: A Framework Eric lives in Oak Park, Illinois with his about the details of our new process and for More Effective Giving. He is wife, daughter, and two cuddly cats. passionate about high-impact giving and Our Panel of Experts

been an award-winning Chief Executive of charity Global Cool, which promotes green living. She has Award, the Presidential Early Career advised donors including the Emirates Award for Scientists and Engineers Foundation in UAE, Eurostar, ERM (PECASE), a Guggenheim Fellowship, and (Environmental Resources Management: the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. a global environmental consultancy), the Dean is also on the Executive Committee Ashden Awards, the Big Lottery Fund, of the Board of Directors of the M.I.T. the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts, Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Caroline fiennes professional tennis players, the Private Dean’s research focuses on micro- Equity Foundation, BBC Children in Need, economic issues of public policies and Caroline Fiennes (formerly Newhouse) Booz & Co., and Morgan Stanley. This DEAN KARLAN poverty. Much of his work uses behavioral advises people and companies on giving work has spanned environment, health, economics insights and approaches to well to charities. She is one of the few education, international development, Dean Karlan is Professor of Economics examine economic and policy issues people whose work has been featured in children’s issues and other areas. at Yale University and the Founder of relevant to developing countries, with OK! magazine and The Lancet. Her book, It Innovations for Poverty Action and particular attention to policies to increase Ain’t What You Give, It’s The Way That You Caroline is on boards of the US Center for ImpactMatters. He received his Ph.D in income and financial wellbeing for those Give It, has been called “The Freakonomics Effective Philanthropy, Charity Navigator Economics 2002 from the Massachusetts in extreme poverty. In the United States, of the charity world.” (the world’s largest charity rating agency) Institute of Technology, and prior to that and Evidence Aid (part of The Cochrane completed an MBA and MPP from the he works on charitable giving, financial She is Director of Giving Evidence, a Collaboration) and is the Corporation of University of Chicago. He is a recipient of services for the under and unbanked, and company which specialises in ‘advice on London’s City Philanthropy Coach. She also the National Science Foundation CAREER behavioral health. giving, based on evidence‘. She frequently works with Innovations for Poverty Action speaks and writes in the press, and has and the University of Chicago.

14 15 2016 ANNUAL REPORT CLOSING THOUGHTS

Fight Against Stupidity from Philosophy Now. His TED Talk, The Why and How of CLOSING THOUGHTS Effective Altriusm, has been viewed over 1.3 million times. Much of this report has focused on growth: how much Peter is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor we’ve grown so far and the foundation we’re laying for future of Bioethics in the University Center for growth. But in all the discussion of metrics, growth rates, and Human Values at Princeton University, infrastructure, it’s easy to forget that these are all means toward a position that he has held since 1999. From 2005 on, he has also held the part- an end. Our work only has value to the extent that it creates PETER SINGER time position of Laureate Professor at the meaningful improvement in the lives of the global poor. We want University of Melbourne, in the Centre for to grow because the scope of extreme poverty demands a Peter Singer, founder of The Life You Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. He dramatically larger response than it currently receives. Can Save, is known as “the godfather of has taught at the University of Oxford, La ”, a social movement Trobe University, and Monash University, We’re inspired to be connected to so many people who are joining that encourages people to do as much and has held several other visiting good as they can with the resources they appointments. in the fight against global poverty. Anyone would leap into action have available. if they happened upon a child drowning in a pond. But when the He is the author of the seminal 1972 person who needs our help lives half a world away, far too few He is one of the world’s leading moral essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” philosophers and has been named one and two recent books that make the are willing to come to their aid. Thank you for being one of those of the world’s three most influential case for effective giving, The Life You taking action; the lives you can save are lives worth saving. contemporary thinkers by the Gottlieb Can Save (Random House, 2009) and Duttweiler Institute and one of the (Yale, 2015). world’s 100 most influential people by Additionally, he has written or edited over Time Magazine. Among countless other 40 books on topics ranging from altruism SUPPORT OUR WORK  accolades, Singer was presented the to bioethics, animal liberation, and the 2016 Award for Contributions in the environment.

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[1] The Life You Can Save’s funders typically support us as a way to leverage their giving to help the global poor. If we weren’t around, it’s reasonable to assume these funders would generally support effective nonprofits providing direct services to this population. Fred Hollows [2] For details on the methodology we use in our metrics, please see our writeup How We Calculate Our Impact Foundation 16 17