Charity overview

The Happier Lives Institute is the charity and nonprofit organisation that produces this website.

Our goal is to find and promote the best charities that improve global happiness. We do this by conducting scientifically rigorous research into different cause areas, interventions, and charities.

What problem is the Happier Lives Institute working on?

It’s hard to choose the best charity to donate to. There are so many charities to choose from. And some charities are far more effective than others.

It’s also hard to know which charities create the most happiness.

Luckily, we’ve already done detailed research into which are the best charities, globally, for creating happiness. We then share, for free, what we’ve found so far.

We’re the only organisation in the world that does this, so there’s plenty more useful work to do.

What does the Happier Lives Institute do?

Charity evaluations

Our mission is to help you donate to the charities that have the most impact on people’s happiness.

We’re the first and only charity evaluator to recommend charities based on objective measures of how much happiness they create.

Research into causes of happiness

We do extensive, scientific research into which ‘cause areas’ make the most difference to people’s happiness, including:

• Mental health
• Nutrition
• Parenting

And within those cause areas, we research specific interventions, such as:

• Psychotherapy services
• Preventing malnutrition by adding micronutrients to food supply chains
• Preventing lead poisoning
• Parent education programmes

Foundational research

We research and publish on foundational frameworks. For example:

• The nature of wellbeing – what is a good life?
• The measurement of wellbeing – what’s best way to do this?
• Challenging topics, like how to trade-off quality and quantity of life

Outreach and campaigning

We advocate for maximising happiness on a global scale, including:

• Providing free resources about the best ways to make the world a happier place
• Sharing our methods with other researchers and organisations
• Engaging with policymakers, charities and other organisations to measure and optimise for happiness

Why donate to the Happier Lives Institute?

By donating to the Happier Lives Institute, you’ll be:

• Supporting novel, important research. We’re leading the charge on finding the best, evidenced-based ways to make lives better. This includes groundbreaking investigations into causes, charities, and foundational issues. There’s much to do.

• Supporting outreach to donors and decision-makers. By sharing our research, we allow people to make a bigger difference than they would have otherwise. Funding us is a leverage opportunity: rather than giving directly to a charity, you can fund us to spread the word and help others have more impact.

• Ensuring we stay impartial. We never take commission from the charities we recommend. We’re proud to be unbiased – but that does mean we’re fully reliant on donations made to us directly.

• Protecting a unique mission. Sadly, there are no other charity evaluators that ‘take happiness seriously’ in the way we do. Without funding, we won’t be able to continue our mission.

• Getting transparent results. We’re open about our levels of confidence, mistakes we’ve made, and areas where we need to improve.

• Growing the wellbeing revolution. We’re one of the only organisations pushing for the world to start using happiness as a measure of success. And now, even the UK and New Zealand governments are measuring happiness.

How cost-effective are we vs the charities we recommend?

Donors often ask us how cost-effective we are compared to the charities we recommend. This is a difficult task, not least because it’s hard to be objective about yourself.

However, we were independently assessed in 2023 by Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). This was at the request of Ambitious Impact (formerly Charity Entrepreneurship), the non-profit incubator we went through in 2019, who wanted to understand their former incubatees.

The IPA estimated that donations to the Happier Lives Institute create 320 WELLBYs per $1,000 donated. This is 40 times more cost-effective than donations to GiveDirectly, a charity that provides cash transfers we use as a benchmark in our work. In fact, this implies donating to HLI is far more impactful than any of the charities we recommend. We take this result with a large pinch of salt.

The main assumptions in the IPA analysis were:

1. HLI’s research has successfully identified charities several times more cost-effective than cash transfers. 
2. Our outreach would lead to donors switch from charities as good as cash transfers to our top charities 
3. We were on track to move $10m a year by 2029 (we hope we exceed this!). They also considered our running costs.

The reason we take the IPA conclusion with a pinch of salt is because our work is less scalable than the charities we recommend. We do think we’re the best buy per dollar (otherwise we’d be doing something else), but only up to a point.

If we receive funding to fill our budget for the next 18 months, we will publicly declare this, and donate the funds to our top recommended charities. At the time of writing (November 2024) this means we need to fundraise about $400k to reach that point.

For more details, see the full IPA report.

Need for funding

Donations to Happier Lives Institute will go towards our operational budgets, which cover:

• Staff salaries and freelancer costs (we’re a research organisation, so staff are the lion’s share of the budget)
• Expenses – website, services
• Outreach and fundraising

Also note:

• We take care to be responsible with any funding we receive. This means we keep our costs low. Our team is small. We don’t have a highly paid CEO. And we don’t pay for big marketing agencies.
• If we receive funding to fill our budget for the next 18 months, we will donate funds to our top recommended charities.