Strategic Cause Selection

Philanthropists tend to choose causes based on familiarity, emotional connection, or recent events that captured their attention. They might focus on education because they had an inspiring teacher, support cancer research after a family member’s diagnosis, or champion a cause after hearing a moving story on the news. While this approach is understandable — if it weren’t for the personal connection they feel to a cause, they might give much less, or perhaps nothing at all — it can lead philanthropists to overlook opportunities to have a greater impact.

Once philanthropists select their causes, they typically do good work: they develop strategies through conversations with field experts, identify potential grantees, and work closely with those grantees over time. But we think the most important decision a philanthropist makes is choosing which causes to fund in the first place. In traditional philanthropy, that initial choice of which problems to work on doesn’t get much attention, but it has enormous implications for impact. Personal interests or passions may not help donors distinguish between an intervention that can save thousands of lives from one that has no lasting impact.

What makes a good philanthropic cause

We use our research to look for causes that are strong on a combination of the criteria below, which are designed as proximate metrics for the ultimate goal of cost-effectiveness and maximizing impact. While no framework is perfect, this one helps us compare very different problems in a consistent way.

Importance

How many individuals does this issue affect, and how deeply? How much good could a major breakthrough accomplish? (This might include health improvements, economic value created, reductions in suffering, or reduced risk of global catastrophes.) We consider both the number of lives affected and the severity of impact.

Over the last decade, we’ve come to place significantly more weight on importance (or scale), relative to the other factors. We’ve learned that focusing on truly large problems — even when they’re challenging — can offer greater opportunities for doing good, compared to finding the most tractable opportunities in less consequential areas.

Neglectedness

Does the cause already receive adequate attention and resources? All else equal, we prefer causes that receive less attention from others — including donors, businesses, and governments — where each dollar tends to go even further. These causes often involve helping populations that lack resources and influence, or supporting work with great promise but a low chance of success. Both categories are often a better fit for philanthropists than businesses or governments.

Attention is often disproportionate to a cause’s importance. For example, cancer causes roughly eight times as many deaths as tuberculosis, but has roughly 100 times as much annual research funding. (Globally, cancer research funding is over $80 billion a year, versus $800 million a year for TB.)

In the last decade, we’ve noticed that the first dollars into a truly neglected field can go especially far. But a cause doesn’t need to be neglected for us to work on it: we can find valuable opportunities even in more crowded spaces when they’re important enough. Donors who develop expertise in an area can often identify specific leverage points within more crowded areas where targeted funding can still have significant impact, even when the broader cause area already receives substantial attention.

Tractability

Can philanthropic funding contribute to significant progress? We prefer causes where there are clear ways additional resources could drive results, whether through proven interventions that need scaling, promising research that’s underfunded, or coordination efforts that could unlock government action.

However, we’ve learned over time that tractability is somewhat difficult to assess over the medium term, and we now place somewhat less weight on it than we did in our early years. What appears intractable in year two might become tractable in year five as circumstances shift, and the difficulty of predicting those shifts mean that early investments in neglected and seemingly-intractable fields can have outsize returns. We’ve seen that with our early support of the Yes-In-My-Backyard (YIMBY) movement for more housing, which has since achieved major wins like City of Yes in New York and SB 79 in California.

Applying these criteria in practice

The Lead Exposure Action Fund (LEAF), which we launched in 2024, illustrates how this framework works in practice.

Lead poisoning causes over 1.5 million deaths each year but received only about $10–15 million in annual philanthropic funding before LEAF launched; several diseases with similar health burdens, like malaria and tuberculosis, attracted a hundred times more. It’s surprising that lead exposure is so neglected, because there are many good ways to prevent it. For example, when a 2019 study found high levels of lead in turmeric in Bangladesh and the local authorities took action, a follow-up study found that blood lead levels fell by roughly 30%.

By identifying an important problem (large health burden), that was both neglected (inadequate philanthropic support) and tractable (proven interventions exist), we had an opportunity for outsized impact. In its first year, LEAF deployed $42 million toward proven or promising interventions, more than tripling the previous rate of philanthropic spending on lead exposure — a clear example of an area where relatively modest funding could drive transformative change.

Our process for finding and evaluating causes

For causes that seem promising, we conduct investigations at varying levels of depth. Since 2012, we’ve investigated hundreds of potential causes, from traffic safety to geomagnetic storms.

We begin by conducting shallow investigations. We get a quick lay of the land by interviewing experts and reading background material. In these investigations, we try to understand: What is the problem or opportunity? What could be done to address it? Who else is working on it? Most of our published shallow investigations are from our initial exploratory work from 2013 to 2016, though we continue to conduct new ones.

If the cause looks sufficiently promising, we proceed to medium-depth investigations. The investigator writes a comprehensive literature review, outlines a potential strategy, and sometimes makes exploratory grants to understand the funding landscape. This process helps us understand whether an area has enough opportunities above our “bar” for cost-effective giving to justify entering the space.

If the area meets that standard, we launch a fund and hire a leader to manage it. Leaders deepen expertise in their areas, build networks with key researchers and practitioners, and look for the best funding opportunities over time. This role is critical to making progress, as the best opportunities often aren’t obvious to generalists or newcomers to a field. We see finding the right program leaders as key to our potential impact and will hold off on entering some areas if we can’t find the right person.

When we launch a fund, we make a multi-year commitment to support new grants. That long-term focus helps us attract strong talent, encourages grantees to plan ambitiously, and signals seriousness to other funders. Our commitment can help establish a neglected area as a legitimate philanthropic priority and unlock more funding.

We periodically evaluate each fund to reflect on whether we’re using our resources as effectively as possible. Windows of opportunity can shift — a cause that seemed promising initially might become crowded with other funders, or new information might reveal better opportunities elsewhere. Re-evaluation sometimes means expanding a program, spinning it out, or winding it down responsibly by providing transition support. Commitment doesn’t mean rigidity and we see occasionally changing course as a sign of learning and growth — philanthropy should adapt as evidence changes.

This page draws from two older articles: “Strategic Cause Selection” (2012) and “Cause Selection” (2018).