The primary purpose of charity evaluation is to provide reliable information about charities to the general public. This is couched in a concern that when one gives to a charity, little of that money goes directly to the cause which inspired one to give in the first place. As such, charity evaluators investigate the effectiveness of a charity at achieving its purported goals. This can be done in a number of ways but is typically performed by investigating the extent to which the money given to a charity translates into discernible and quantifiable changes in outcome for the cause that is being targeted. A charity typically must operate on a certain scale in order to make such a meaningful change and thus many charity evaluators consider large, complex operations to be the best to donate to. However, this form of evaluation may miss many of the important work being done by new charities and the good that will continue to follow if these charities are supported in their development.

The mission of Emerging Effective Charity Evaluators (EECE) is to support and provide information to the general public about new or early-stage charities. We aim to bring small yet effective charities greater public attention while also using our financial resources to support these charities. EECE operates under the principles of effective altruism, identifying the best charitable opportunities through criteria like the importance of a charity’s mission, how neglected its cause has been by other organizations, and how tractable the charity’s intervention is to implement We see ourselves as playing a vital, previously overlooked, role in charity evaluation. By raising awareness and financial support for these emerging charities early in their development, we aim to increase their rate of development while the information we gather will allow us to evaluate and recommend the best of these charities to the public. This, in turn, will bring more attention and support to the charity from other potential donors. It is our belief that when compared to giving to developed charities, these early-stage donations can be distinctively beneficial by decreasing the time a charity remains relatively unknown and therefore underfunded. In this way, we see early financial support as an important means to assist emerging charities to more quickly and efficiently carry out their mission. By providing a means to assess the quality of new charities, we hope to be able to mitigate risk while aiding the work of emerging effective charities.