Ella 1.0 helps you learn how charities generate income, how they spend supporters money and how the general public feels about the charity - so you can make a more informed decision about your giving.

Ella is designed to be a helpful tool for managing tasks and improving productivity, and I hope that users find it to be a valuable addition to their daily routines.

👋 Hi PH, I have often thought about how I can do my bit to help make a difference, to somehow better the lives of those less fortunate than me. The obvious solution was to turn to the people already doing this, charity. But the problem I found is that it just isn't easy to know where I should donate my money so that it actually makes an impact for the cause I'm supporting. You hear tale after tale of money being eaten up by huge admin costs and little about how charities are actually making a difference. 🛠 Solution Ella is a tool that helps to sort the good charities from the not-so-good, by combining a breakdown of a charity's income and expenditure into clear & obvious categories and crowdsourcing public perception of a charity. So now if you're undecided about where to give, you can turn to data and the view of others to help you make that decision. 👉 Features - Learn about a charitable cause, the problems, solutions, and the charities working on it. - Search for a charity or cause by name or keyword - Quick view charity trust scores and key metrics - View a breakdown of a charity's income and expenditure for their most recent financial year - View historical income and expenditure information for the past five years - View crowdsourced ratings of how the general public feels about a charity - Contribute your own scores to a charity 🙏 Let me know what you think! I'm keen to make Ella into a really useful tool not only for supporters, but for charities too.

@_danielmeade Hello, this is really interesting, also read your first journal post (https://givewithella.com/journal...)! I'm curious about the ratings. If its all crowdfunded how would you prevent spam/ bias information etc..? I've been looking for something like this but I never end up trusting the reviews. I feel like you could run a few experiments since you're still in the early days, 1 interesting that comes to mind: if you leave a rating you have to donate whatever amount you want to another charity - this would force maybe high-quality ratings?

@rodrigue_ Hey Rodrigue, thanks for checking it out! When each charity is added our system applies a neutral score to all ratings. This neutral score is equivalent to a set number of unique votes, so no one voter can have a dramatic effect on the overall ratings. A charity can of course push their supporters to add positive scores, and that can be open to some bias, but due to the anonymous nature and the usefulness factor for both the charity and supporters, I’m confident that even those prompted to leave ratings would do so fairly. The same thing works the other way around, so a negative bias will have little effect from a single voter. And if ever there is a point where voters submit en masse we are able to see these and can make a decision as to the integrity of those scores and correct accordingly. Even with individual biases, the volume of data we hope to collect gives me confidence that the scores will balance out to reveal a true reflection of public perception.

This is great, where are you getting these data?

@anthonygawonlee We’re sourcing charity financial data from the Charities Commission, which every UK registered charity has to report to each year.

@_danielmeade Very neat. Let me know if you need a volunteer to help out. =)

Love it! Looks awesome - just a couple questions: any thoughts on 1. integrating with givewell data/other charity rating orgs? 2. would love a "I'm feeling lucky" button that takes you to a random good charity. Keep up the good work!

@calchulus Hey Calvin, Thanks very much for the kind words! 1. We do have plans to integrate and learn from data collected by other services. In building this project for the UK market we learned that there are actually very few of these resources available, whereas in other markets (like the US) there are a number of highly respected services doing just this. As we expand in to those markets we'll look at how we can integrate their data with ours. 2. That's a great suggestion, thanks for the idea!

Ella

Restoring trust in charity by forcing transparency.

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