Giving to charity is great, not just for the recipients but for the givers, too.

But it can be intimidating to know how to pick the best charity when there are thousands of worthy causes to choose from, and especially when so many are suffering around the world.

Yet that suffering makes it all the more clear why giving, and why doing our best to give effectively, is so important. There’s a lot of need out there, and it matters not just whether we give, but how. Effective giving can translate into more lives saved and more lives improved. Even among charities that target the poorest people in developing countries — where charities can typically be most impactful because a dollar goes much further — the most effective charities produce a whopping 100 times more benefit than average charities, according to expert estimates.

So this holiday season, we thought it might be helpful to update our annual guide to giving. Think of this as not only a rundown of charity recommendations, but also a broader guide to thinking about how to give. Here are a few simple tips for end-of-year giving that can help.

1. Check in with charity recommenders

It’s of course possible to research charity options yourself, but you can save some time by outsourcing that labor to a careful, methodologically rigorous charity recommender like GiveWell. Charity Navigator has started following in GiveWell’s footsteps by evaluating charities based on their ability to do the most good at the lowest cost; GiveWell has a longer track record, but Charity Navigator’s impact scores are worth consulting, too.

GiveWell, which functions somewhat like a grantmaker, currently lists four top charities. Its recommendation, if you find it hard to choose among the four, is to donate to the Top Charities Fund, which goes directly to those top charities based on GiveWell’s assessment of where the money is most helpful given the different groups’ funding needs.

The top charities are:

• Malaria Consortium, which helps distribute preventive antimalarial medication to children (a program known as “seasonal malaria chemoprevention”)
• Against Malaria Foundation, which buys and distributes insecticidal bed nets, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa but also in Papua New Guinea
• Helen Keller Intl, which provides technical assistance to, advocates for, and funds vitamin A supplementation programs in sub-Saharan Africa, which reduce child mortality
• New Incentives, which increases uptake of routine immunizations by offering small cash incentives to families in Nigeria when they get their children vaccinated

GiveWell chose those charities based on how much good each additional donation would do, not necessarily how good the groups are overall. In other words, these are organizations that can put new funding to use, rather than sitting on it. Other charities do great work, too, but if they’re already decently funded, they might not do the most good with your extra dollar.

The Vox guide to giving

The holiday season is giving season. This year, Vox is exploring every element of charitable giving — from making the case for donating 10 percent of your income, to recommending specific charities for specific causes, to explaining what you can do to make a difference beyond donations. You can find all of our giving guide stories here.

GiveWell also supports novel interventions, but through its All Grants Fund, not its Top Charities Fund. That can mean giving an organization a grant to run a study in order to find out whether a hypothetical future program is feasible, like a January 2023 grant to a group in Rwanda to run a randomized evaluation of its program training farmers to grow trees for timber. It can also mean funding time-sensitive programs, like the rollout of a new malaria vaccine.

It’s worth noting that GiveWell takes disconfirming research seriously. In 2017, it recommended Evidence Action’s No Lean Season, which offered no-interest loans to farmers in Bangladesh during the “lean season” between planting rice and harvesting it; the loans are conditional on a family member temporarily moving to a city or other area for short-term work. But a subsequent randomized evaluation found that the program didn’t actually spur people to migrate or increase their incomes, and GiveWell and Evidence Action then agreed that it should no longer be a top charity.........

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