What Price Proof?
Almost all grantmakers would like to know whether or not their work and decisions are making a positive difference in the world.
But there’s a dilemma that faces grantmakers who really want to know for sure that their money is making a difference.
Consider two grants. The first is the only grant made to a laboratory developing a treatment for a disease. Eighteen months later, a new drug enters clinical trials; four years after that, it receives approval - it works! The line between cheque and cure is as clear as a line can be in this messy world of ours.
The second grant goes to an organisation that finds and develops young community leaders. They nurture talent, train people, network them, support their dreams.
How might we know whether this grant worked? The challenge of establishing proof of impact with this second grant is doubly difficult. First, it is hard to develop clear measurements for something like “successful community leadership” in the first place. And second, determining attribution is a nightmare. Let’s say a specific community clearly improves on a range of measures, after this grant is made: unemployment down, happiness up. The measurement problem is that there might be a host of other explanations for why things got better. Maybe the local council improved. Maybe the economy grew. Maybe the decision to ban lead in petrol half a century ago made the difference.
The uncomfortable conclusion then is this: if you genuinely need to rigorously prove your impact—if your trustees demand it, if your donors insist upon it, if your own conscience requires it—then you must necessarily constrain yourself to a remarkably narrow band of human endeavour. Specifically those areas of charitable work which by chance or design happen to be quite provable in their impacts.
It is this narrowness that leads to the fascinating story of GiveWell. GiveWell is a “nonprofit dedicated to finding outstanding giving opportunities and sharing the full details of our analysis with everyone for free”. They basically tell people which charities they should give money to, to get lots of bang for their donated bucks. They also operate funding programmes themselves.
They are the epitome of a funder that cares about quality evidence. In their own words they “Spend more than 70,000 hours each year reviewing academic evidence and researching different programs to identify highly cost-effective, evidence-backed ones”. They have encouraged their donors to give their recommended charities over two billion US dollars. They’re the real deal, and they really, really care about quality evidence of impact.
But… they only fully endorse FOUR nonprofits as good enough to donate to. This is their full list of recommended charities after researching and operating for seventeen years. Every one of these is clearly an absolutely fantastic organisation. And Givewell itself is a remarkable nonprofit with incredible skills.
But if you scan the whole list of recommended grantees you will very soon see that all four are healthcare charities. Which is because medicine is one of the few areas of charitable endeavour in which we have the really good tools to measure our impact with confidence. And even in this most fertile of charitable domains, the effort required to establish proof of impact is simply immense.
Now, we are not sharing this story as an encouragement to our readers to abandon trying to measure your impact: Modern Grantmakers value evidence! And we are most definitely not sharing it to encourage a return to "grantmaking by vibes", which comes with so much baked in bias. Instead we want to persuade you of this key idea: grantmaking impact exists on a spectrum, from the provable to the purely faith-based. Every grant you ever make can be slotted in that spectrum, somewhere between highly provable and completely unknowable.
There are two consequences of this spectrum, one pragmatic, one moral.
First, pragmatics. Some grantmakers deliberately maintain a portfolio of grants spread across this spectrum, accepting that some grants are investments in certainty, while others are acts of hope. We think this is quite a nice way of showing that you do understand and respect how good evidence can create greater impact. But by investing across the spectrum, you also embrace the “cross-fingers-and-toes” attitude required to fund in some important areas like climate change, or changing hearts and minds in society at large.
The second consequence is humility. When so many grantmaking domains resist measurement with an almost deliberate perversity, humility becomes essential. All grantmakers need to be humble, willing to consider they might be wrong and others might be right. In hard-to-measure fields the best picture of what is going on mostly emerges in slivers and nuggets and brief flashes of insight that emerge from conversations with people working at the coalface. An arrogant funder won’t make grantees comfortable enough to tell their stories, and won’t know how to listen if they do.
Humility won’t get you a standard of proof up there with a drug trial. But humility can give you access to the distributed knowledge held in the heads of many people who are directly working on the problems you care about. And that’s a prize worth the price, to give you the best shot at supporting some of the most important issues in the world.
Latest Reading, Watching & Listening - Modern Grantmaking recommends
How about a new job or trustee role in grantmaking?
Howden Foundation (UK) is hiring for a Vice Chair of the board. Voluntary role (expenses covered). Deadline is midnight on 13 October 2025. Cripplegate Foundation (UK) is hiring for governor trustees. Voluntary role (expenses covered). Deadline is 17.00 on 16 October 2025. The Global Fund for a New Economy (EU) is hiring for a Network Manager: Communications and Advocacy. Globally remote with a preference for the Global South. Salary is $70,000 – $85,000 USD. Salary will be paid in the local currency equivalent to the contractually agreed USD amount. Deadline is 20 October 2025. Want to see your job ad in next month’s newsletter? Ping us, it’s free! Just… #ShowTheSalary
Want to see your job ad in next month’s newsletter? Ping us, it’s free! Just… #ShowTheSalary
Grantmaking ‘joke’ of the month
What happened to the grantmaker who didn’t pay their exorcist?
Their house was repossessed.
Got any terrible or actually funny grantmaking jokes to share?......tell us.
Have you been forwarded this newsletter? Want to subscribe?
Who are we?
Gemma Bull and Tom Steinberg run Modern Grantmaking, and write this newsletter. We do consulting and training specifically for funders, and wrote a book on how to be a modern grantmaker, too.
