Charities often take credit for significant achievements without explaining how they contributed. In our view, this practice is worse than explicitly listing low-quality work because it forces donors into making assumptions to fill in gaps.
When a charity uses vague work to justify impressive accomplishments, donors often think:
"I don't really understand what this charity does, but they sound really impactful, so I'll go ahead and donate."
This results in bad charities receiving money that they don't deserve.
Consider a charity that holds a three-person protest outside McDonald's, then openly claims that their three-person protest caused McDonald's to switch to cage-free eggs.
Objectively, this impact claim is misleading, as it's highly unlikely that such a small action accomplished anything. However, at least in this scenario, donors know exactly what the charity did and can decide for themselves whether this is the type of work they wish to support.
On the other hand, consider a charity that claims to help millions of animals through "policy work."
To many donors, this sounds credible, since policy work has led to some of the world's most important laws and regulations. Thus, even though donors have no details about the charity's "policy work," many of them believe the charity truly is helping millions of animals.
And why does this work so well for charities? Because even if the charity's "policy work" was as trivial as sending a single email, donors would have no way of discovering this, and the charity could continue to take credit regardless.
The reason vagueness is a big problem is because it is universally accessible. Any charity, even a complete scam, can employ it simply by saying their work is "confidential."
And when vague descriptions of work are rewarded, charities that do actual work and inform donors about it can lose out to complete scams.
Charities that provide vague or no descriptions of their work are difficult to assess. When no work is listed, there's nothing to evaluate, challenge, or verify — which protects low-quality or fraudulent efforts from scrutiny. Furthermore, even if a criticism is made, the charity has a massive asymmetry of information (they know everything about their work and the public knows nothing), and can also just make up work on the spot to defend themselves.
To address this, we do not credit charities with impact if they only provide vague descriptions of their work. This approach discourages vagueness, reduces the advantage dishonest charities have, and incentivizes all organizations to clearly explain what they actually do.
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