GiveDirectly
It was June 2017, and Michael Faye, Piali Mukhopadhyay, and Paul Niehaus were having a meeting seated around the living room table in Faye’s New York City apartment. As on so many other occasions when they had gathered around this table, they were discussing the future of GiveDirectly, the nonprofit organization that they had built to collect money from donors in wealthy countries to transfer to people living in extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. But this conversation felt different. The team had already succeeded in establishing GiveDirectly as a widely admired organization in the charitable giving sector, and they believed they were now at an inflection point, ready to scale up GiveDirectly to be a transformational force in the international aid community.
GiveDirectly had come a long way since its beginnings as a small group of development economics Ph.D. students who wanted to channel their personal donations to fight against the poverty they observed when conducting their doctoral fieldwork. By 2017, the organization had garnered the philanthropic backing of Google.org (the social impact arm of Google), co-founders of Facebook, and thousands of smaller donors. These supporters were galvanized by GiveDirectly’s simply stated but broad-reaching mission: to get money in the hands of poor people. With this group’s help, GiveDirectly had already distributed tens of millions of dollars to poor households in Kenya and Uganda. But GiveDirectly’s leaders knew that much more work had to be done in order to achieve their ambition of spurring the entire international aid sector to transfer more resources to the poor via direct cash transfers, instead of via programs with little evidence of efficacy. GiveDirectly would have to grow in scale, and the leadership team was grappling with the issue of how to measure and reward success for the employees who would drive this growth. GiveDirectly, they believed, had been successful both at delivering money to the extreme poor and also at starting to shift views on cash transfers in the aid sector more broadly. Its employees were well-paid by the standards of most nonprofit organizations, with some receiving performance-based monetary bonuses, but compensation was not consistently tied to any common metric of organizational success. Now the leadership team was contemplating a much bolder system of organizational goal-setting and financial incentives. Would this approach streamline strategic decision-making and help to attract and retain the right talent? Would employees find it motivating? Or were there good reasons why a quantifiable bottom line and pay-for- performance schemes were almost unheard-of in the nonprofit sector?
Professors John Beshears and Joshua Schwartzstein, Research Associate Tiffany Y. Chang, and Professor Brian J. Hall prepared this case. It was reviewed and approved before publication by a company designate. Funding for the development of this case was provided by Harvard Business School and not by the company. HBS cases are developed solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management.
The Founding of GiveDirectly: Reshaping International Aid
The co-founders of GiveDirectly—Faye, Niehaus, Jeremy Shapiro, and Rohit Wanchoo—first met each other as graduate students specializing in development economics at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All four were passionate about studying barriers to economic growth and solutions for overcoming those barriers, and they were committed to doing their part personally to alleviate global poverty. In 2007, they began a series of conversations about the concrete actions that they should take, beyond conducting research, to help improve the lives of the poor.
As of 2008, nearly 18% of the world’s population, or 1.2 billion people, lived in extreme poverty.a,1 As a proportion of the population, extreme poverty was the most pervasive in sub-Saharan Africa, where 47% of people, or 389 million, lived below the poverty line.2 According to the 2008 Millennium Development Goals Report issued by the United Nations, the region had made some progress since 1990 but had 157 deaths of children under the age of five per thousand live births, 9 maternal deaths per thousand live births, and a 71% primary school enrollment rate, all of which were significantly worse than the comparable metrics for other developing regions.
Faye, Niehaus, Shapiro, and Wanchoo were moved to contribute their own money towards the goal of reducing poverty. Naturally data-driven, they researched how to deliver the most impact with their financial donations.
In Search of the Greatest Impact per Donated Dollar
They considered some of the best-known charities, such as the American Red Cross. While the Red Cross’s work focused on the U.S., it also delivered a significant amount of development aid to Africa. According to a pamphlet summarizing its efforts, it “worked with the Tanzania Red Cross to provide health care and water and sanitation services for 252,000 refugees from Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo.”4 It helped to provide drought relief to 2.8 million people in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and Tanzania. It worked to provide water access and latrines for refugees returning to Southern Sudan. Its HIV program aimed to reach 18,000 people “to prevent the spread of HIV and its devastating impact on communities.” It vaccinated “over 1 billion children in more than 80 countries” as part of its Measles Initiative, contributing to a 92% decrease (371,000 to 28,000) in measles deaths in Africa from 2000 to 2008. While the Red Cross was clearly heavily involved in international aid, it was unclear how to precisely quantify the impact of its efforts relative to other potential uses of its donor funding.
The common measures of effectiveness produced by independent charity evaluation websites— such as BBB Wise Giving Alliance, GuideStar, Charity Navigator, and CharityWatch—focused almost exclusively on the cost side of the equation. For example, the two most prominent elements of CharityWatch’s evaluation of the Red Cross were the program percentage, or the proportion of spending put towards programs as opposed to overhead, and the cost to raise $100 (Exhibit 1). According to Nonprofit Quarterly, an organization dedicated to publishing news about the nonprofit sector, many observers evaluated nonprofits on the basis of “how an organization spends its resources…The knee-jerk reaction…is to consider program expenses as good and management and fundraising expenses (so-called overhead) as bad.”5 Niehaus found this perspective unhelpful: The problem is that these statistics say nothing about how much value these programs create for the end An individual was defined as living in extreme poverty if his or her consumption or income fell below the World Bank’s International Poverty Line, set as of the writing of this case at $1.90 per day using 2011 Purchasing Power Parity. Purchasing Power Parity considers price data to adjust nominal dollar figures in a way that allows for meaningful comparisons of buying power across countries. The poverty line is periodically adjusted to reflect changes in the cost of living around the world. Before October 2015, the poverty line had been set at $1.25 per day using 2005 Purchasing Power Parity.
Faye speculated that nonprofits lacked the incentives to supply data that would make it possible to determine how much value was produced per dollar they received in donations, and lacked the incentives to agree on a common definition for “value” in the first place. “The system isn’t accountable to traditional market dynamics,” Faye said. “Unlike other industries, where the consumer pays for a product or service that they themselves use, a philanthropic donor pays for a product or service that will be delivered to someone else. If the service isn’t good or impactful, there’s a good chance the donor will never know. After all, why would the NGOb tell them?”
Developing a New Concept for Development Aid Frustrated with the typical measures by which nonprofits measured performance and success, Faye, Niehaus, Shapiro, and Wanchoo turned to a growing research literature produced by academic and policy institutions using randomized controlled trials (RCTsc) to evaluate the impact of different anti- poverty interventions. They found a number of rigorous RCTs that provided strong evidence for the effectiveness of direct cash transfers as a tool for improving nutrition, health, education, and other outcomes among households living in poverty. Coupling these findings with the increasing sophistication and coverage of mobile payment technologies like M-Pesa in developing countries, a vision to transform the practice of international aid began to take shape. Niehaus explained:
During the first 50 years of development work, experimental evaluations had rarely been done, and so the early 2000s were this incredibly exciting time as we started to test all the theories of change that had accumulated. The tests were showing that many of the things we thought would work did not, while some things we thought wouldn’t work— like simply giving money to poor people—actually did. At the same time, the growth of last-mile payment technologies like mobile money in East Africa meant that you could increasingly pay anyone, anywhere, even in the poorest places on the planet. We thought that these two trends together created the potential to fundamentally reshape the aid and charitable giving industries.
In contrast, most international aid organizations focused on delivering programs and material items, such as training in agricultural techniques for farmers and special seed varieties for planting. “We’ve all inherited a lot of negative stereotypes about giving money to poor people,” Niehaus explained. “[Donors think] it’s not an investment in the future. We reason about giving using simplistic aphorisms—‘teach a man to fish,’ for example. But empirically, the evidence suggests that we are not very good at teaching people to fish, at least not yet…and that giving people money doesn’t just feed them for a day but often has big, long-term impacts.”Based on this line of reasoning, Faye, Niehaus, Shapiro, and Wanchoo developed a shared perspective that money intended for alleviating poverty should be given directly to the poor unless a
A non-governmental organization (NGO) is a nonprofit entity that operates separately from governments to pursue an activity such as promoting public health or economic development. A randomized controlled trial (RCT) is an experiment in which participants are randomly assigned to different interventions and then tracked over time. Because random assignment ensures that the different treatment conditions have roughly the same mix of participants, any differences in the outcomes experienced by one condition relative to another can be attributed to the differences between those conditions, as opposed to some other factor. An old adage states: “Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime.” demonstrably better alternative was available. They believed that such alternatives certainly existed in some cases—for example, donors might have opportunities to fund the provision of public goods, such as the construction of roads, that transfers to individuals would likely not accomplish—but felt the burden of proof should be on the “experts” proposing to spend money in ways the poor themselves would not have chosen.
In 2009, Faye, Niehaus, Shapiro, and Wanchoo started a private donor circle of family and friends, and the positive response from these supporters led the four graduate students to establish a nonprofit named GiveDirectly. The organization would, for the first time, enable anyone, anywhere to send money directly to the poorest of the poor in sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, GiveDirectly’s unique approach would hopefully generate additional rigorous evidence on cash transfers as a poverty alleviation tool and add competitive pressure to existing charities.
From Concept to Reality
GiveDirectly spent two years developing and testing its operating procedures using funds from its private donor circle before accepting donations from the public. During this “stealth” phase and the years that followed, the organization steadily built its capabilities and infrastructure to offer a fully integrated system for transferring money to people living in poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.
Personnel. Some nonprofits built marketing front-ends but sent money to other organizations for the implementation of programs. In contrast, GiveDirectly initially focused on building its field operation, starting with field officers who were tasked with completing all of the work on the ground that was necessary to deliver cash transfers to the final recipients. These field officers were generally college educated and were hired exclusively from the country where the transfers were being administered. When recruiting field officers, GiveDirectly had about six times the number of interested candidates as they had open positions.
Beyond the field officers, GiveDirectly built a staff to take on the management and supervision of field operations, the management of research and evaluation efforts, fundraising, and administration. The co-founders focused on hiring “the best of the best” who might otherwise work for elite for-profit organizations in fields like consulting, technology, and finance. Piali Mukhopadhyay was an exemplar of this type of employee. She held a neuroscience degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a degree in public administration from Princeton University. She had been interested in the field of development for some time, not only having spent meaningful time in rural India with her family but also having conducted research on the impact of digitization on developing economies. Despite her deep-seated interest, however, her early years working in international development left her disillusioned with existing institutions, which often struggled to define and defend their impact. She ultimately decided to join GiveDirectly as the first full- time field manager both for the opportunity to build an organization and because of the founders’ commitment to evidence: “The strong evidence base documenting the positive effects of cash transfers was critical to my decision to join, and I was excited by the idea of putting power back in the hands of the recipients,” she said. Mukhopadhyay eventually became GiveDirectly’s COO, International, responsible for all cash transfer operations along with institutional relationships and other general management.
Delivering Transfers
GiveDirectly developed a detailed set of criteria for targeting the delivery of cash transfers. Countries were chosen based on factors such as the robustness of the mobile money network, the costs of operating, and political stability. Target regions and villages within a country were chosen based on the incidence of poverty, population density, logistical factors, and security. Finally, within a village, GiveDirectly used simple, objective criteria that were predictive of poverty, such as having a small house, not having a latrine, or having a thatched roof instead of a metal one. When field officers worked in a given village, they conducted a census to identify households as potentially eligible, interacted with households to verify eligibility, registered households so that they would be able to receive transfers, and checked with households after electronic transfers had been completed to administer surveys and make sure the entire process had worked well.
The size of the wealth transfer to a household was based on three criteria. First, GiveDirectly’s leadership felt that the wealth transfer should be fair in the sense that it should raise the income of households eligible to receive the transfer to the level of their least well-off but ineligible neighbors. Second, they wanted it within the range of sizes used by cash transfer programs previously subjected to rigorous experimental evaluation. Finally, they desired it to be potentially transformative, that is, large enough to significantly improve recipients’ well-being, perhaps by facilitating large purchases or investments.
The most common transfer size was approximately $1000 USD, disbursed over a period of four months with an initial transfer of about $90 USD followed by two larger transfers. As a point of comparison, the average eligible household in Kenya survived on about $0.65 USD per person daily without the transfer, so
$1000 USD was indeed potentially transformative. Despite the potentially transformative nature of the transfers, however, GiveDirectly tried to frame them in a neutral manner, explaining the basic process and rules to the community at an initial kickoff meeting but then offering recipients no instructions other than to do what they wanted with the money to improve the quality of their lives.
Research and Evaluation
Because research played a central role in the founding of GiveDirectly, and because the founders felt strongly that all nonprofits needed to do more to rigorously test the impact of their programming, it was natural for the organization to engage in scientific evaluations of its programs and processes. The first large-scale RCT involving GiveDirectly took place during the years 2011–2013 and studied 120 villages in the district of Rarieda in western Kenya.7 Half of the villages were randomly assigned to be treatment villages, while the other half were assigned to be control villages. No households in control villages received cash transfers. Within the treatment villages, households that met GiveDirectly’s eligibility criteria were randomly assigned to receive a cash transfer or to be part of a second control group that did not receive a transfer. This second control group enabled the researchers to learn how the transfers affected neighboring households who did not receive transfers themselves. To quantify the impact of the transfers, the researchers conducted detailed surveys asking households to report their consumption, income, assets, food security, health, education, psychological well-being, within-household bargaining patterns, and involvement in domestic violence. They even collected saliva samples from study participants to measure levels of cortisol, a hormone that the human body naturally releases in response to stress. Approximately one year after cash transfers were initiated, treated households had $270 in additional earnings, $430 in additional assets, and $600 of additional non-durable spending (of which $330 was additional spending on food) per $1000 transferred, relative to control households. Treated households also reported greater happiness and life satisfaction and decreased stress and depression.
The control and treatment groups did not exhibit differences in health outcomes, educational outcomes, female empowerment, or spending on alcohol and tobacco. Based on conversations with focus groups, GiveDirectly also concluded that the cash transfers did not cause additional community tension as a side effect. “People were naturally disappointed if they didn’t receive money and others did,” Mukhopadhyay acknowledged, but anecdotally, she observed that villagers were “generally supportive of the process that GiveDirectly used to pick recipients. Moreover, because of within-village personal connections, even if they didn’t receive money, they’re happy that their son or their aunt received money.” Similarly, GiveDirectly observed that the cash transfers did not create community issues such as household conflict, tension and shouting in the village, and theft and violence. Rumors and gossip increased shortly after the start of the transfer program, but the data suggested that the uptick was transient. To address fairness concerns, GiveDirectly went back to control households and gave them cash transfers after the research had concluded.
When the results from this first RCT were publicly released, they attracted significant media attention,8 and large donations (in the millions of dollars) poured into GiveDirectly from technology industry philanthropists and several anonymous donors. The findings also contributed to GiveDirectly’s top ranking from GiveWell, a nonprofit that evaluated other nonprofits based on their impact per donated dollar.
Setting the Stage for Further Growth
By 2017, GiveDirectly had grown to nearly 300 employees and was raising more than $50 million per year from thousands of donors. Revenues came from both institutional and individual donors, with the biggest funders being Google.org and some of the cofounders of Facebook. Several large donors provided support for the organization’s fundraising costs so that more of the money contributed by small donors could be transferred directly to poor households. Faye described the types of people who were most likely to donate to GiveDirectly: “Our donors tend to look beyond the stories and vanity statistics, and instead look for hard evidence, real transparency, and measurable impact. They often align with the growing effective altruism movement.” According to Faye, “these donors tend to skew younger, and are largely from more quant-heavy industries like technology and finance.”
Looking to the future, GiveDirectly’s leaders had the ambition to grow the organization to rival the giants of the nonprofit sector. There had been remarkable stasis at the top: of the top five charities by annual revenue, the youngest was founded in 1910.9 In order to break into that elite circle, GiveDirectly would need to hire, motivate, and provide strategic direction to a large number of energetic and dedicated employees. To work towards that goal, they focused on three decisions. First, what should be the organization’s overall measure of success? How could they translate its qualitative mission into a quantitative metric, and should they even attempt to do so? Second, what individual goal-setting process should they use to coordinate employees in pursuing this mission? And third, how should an employee’s compensation reflect both broad organizational performance and the achievement of individual goals?
Measuring Organizational Success
In the nonprofit sector, there was not a default measure of success as there was in the for-profit sector, where profit or shareholder value were natural metrics for driving strategy, hiring, performance evaluation, compensation, and culture. Most nonprofits had mission statements, but most also lacked a clear, quantitative measure of success in fulfilling those missions. The leaders of GiveDirectly wanted to be able to explain precisely what their results would look like if they were doing their job well. They gradually settled on measuring the organization’s success primarily by the number of dollars it ultimately put in the hands of poor people. Drawing on the research documenting the benefits of unconditional cash transfers, GiveDirectly’s leaders argued that money in the hands of poor people was a good proxy for improving the lives of the poor. As Niehaus explained, “This metric wouldn’t make any sense if you didn’t have the RCT evidence to support it.” Even with the RCT evidence, however, this measure was a radical challenge to the rest of the nonprofit sector.
GiveDirectly’s primary measure of success enabled a more disciplined approach to a number of organizational decisions. GiveDirectly had historically played many different roles simultaneously. In addition to providing a vehicle for transferring money to people living in poverty, it served as a platform for research and could act as a catalyst for far-reaching changes in the nonprofit sector. By focusing on a single, clear objective, GiveDirectly’s leaders provided a concrete framework for employees throughout the organization to use when making decisions. GiveDirectly’s leaders acknowledged that there were potential drawbacks to their measure of success. It lacked nuance and could lead to some mistakes. For example, many projects GiveDirectly considered had the potential to influence the way other aid organizations spent their money by demonstrating the positive impacts of cash transfers. Focusing on growing GiveDirectly’s transfer volume might mean sacrificing opportunities for this kind of indirect impact. Ultimately, GiveDirectly’s leaders viewed this as an acceptable risk to take in return for the clarity of a simple, objective bottom line.
Creating a Framework for Setting Goals
With the organization’s top-level goal defined, its leaders were looking for a way to ensure that individual employees’ objectives were well-aligned with this goal and well-coordinated with each other. Simply telling all employees to maximize cash delivered to the poor would be ineffective. For example, if the revenue team set a goal of 50% year-on-year growth but the field team did not increase its capacity to deliver transfers at the same pace, bottlenecks would arise.
GiveDirectly’s leaders ultimately chose to implement an “objectives and key results” (OKRs) framework for individual goal setting. In this framework, each employee would be responsible for defining a set of 3-5 qualitative objectives annually and then listing the measurable key results needed in order to achieve those objectives. Before approving her direct reports’ OKRs for the year, each manager would be responsible for ensuring that her team’s OKRs collectively ensured the accomplishment of her own OKRs. This requirement would link objectives up and down the administrative structure and force greater clarity on whether the sum of individual activities within the organization could plausibly add up to each year’s overall goals.
Measuring and Rewarding Individual Performance
Finally, GiveDirectly’s leaders contemplated how to structure compensation in a way that would both create incentives for employees to achieve organizational objectives and help attract talented individuals to join the organization. GiveDirectly’s leaders saw attracting talent as critical to the success of the organization and a particularly pressing need. They noticed that it often took longer to fill an opening at GiveDirectly than it took to fill a comparable role at Segovia, a related for-profit financial technology company that Faye and Niehaus co-founded. They worried that some candidates assumed nonprofits had worse talent and did not compensate competitively, making it difficult for GiveDirectly to recruit exceptional talent quickly and slowing the organization’s otherwise rapid growth.
In an effort to overcome these challenges, GiveDirectly was aggressive in offering generous compensation packages that were competitive with the packages offered by similar-sized start-ups, even if the salary levels did not match the salaries available at large for-profit consulting, finance, and technology firms. GiveDirectly had introduced performance-based annual bonuses of approximately 15% of salary for a handful of its employees, with performance primarily judged according to subjective criteria or the accomplishment of specific individual goals. GiveDirectly also emphasized the exciting pace of its workplace environment, advertising on its website that working at GiveDirectly was an “opportunity to work with A-level talent on the most pressing social issues of our time [in a] culture [that was] professional, analytical, non-hierarchical, fast-paced, and blunt.” Joe Huston, GiveDirectly’s CFO, had worked in the research and trading groups at Bridgewater Associates and was drawn to GiveDirectly’s value proposition: “GiveDirectly offered a unique combination of a compelling, evidence-backed mission, a steep growth trajectory with ample opportunity for individual impact, and a cultural intensity and talent level that’s hard to get in the private sector, let alone at a nonprofit.”
However, GiveDirectly’s leaders sometimes wondered whether they should take bolder steps to attract, retain, and motivate talented employees. What would happen if they linked a significant fraction of annual compensation for all employees to the organization’s overall goal of putting money into the hands of poor people? For example, a Country Director, who is responsible for field operations in a particular country, might receive a base salary plus an incentive payment equal to 0.1% of the cash delivered to households throughout the world, with the incentive payment perhaps comprising one- third of total earnings if annual goals are met. Such an approach would be rare outside the for-profit sector. In a 2015 survey of nonprofit organizations and governmental entities, 77% of respondents used short-term incentive programs, but among the respondents that had a formal annual incentive plan, only 8% determined incentive payouts based on a single, precise measure of performance.10
Whenever the topic of compensation changes came up in discussions, GiveDirectly’s leadership team agreed that any such changes would be designed with two goals in mind. First, by creating greater potential financial upside for employees if the organization succeeded, the leadership team would hope to attract talented employees who might otherwise accept private-sector roles with significant equity compensation. Second, they would hope to create strong incentives for the entire organization to contribute towards growth, and in particular to avoid having staff siloed in verticals with an overly narrow definition of success. Incentivizing all employees against the same metric had the potential to create a more cohesive culture, aligning everyone in the organization towards a common objective.
GiveDirectly’s leaders knew that if they changed compensation systems, they would have to pay careful attention to regulatory compliance issues. Like other nonprofits, GiveDirectly was legally unable to offer equity compensation. This regulation ruled out the possibility of making payments to staff based on a function of the organization’s net revenue. However, GiveDirectly was permitted to link incentive pay to cash delivered into the hands of the poor—a “program services expenditure” in the lexicon of the Internal Revenue Service. GiveDirectly could thereby provide incentives for behavior that clearly furthered the organization’s tax-exempt purpose—alleviating extreme poverty—without running afoul of regulations. GiveDirectly would, however, still face the constraints imposed by the
U.S. tax code on the overall level of salaries in the nonprofit sector.
The leaders of GiveDirectly were not sure how the coming years would play out, but they were determined to help to solve a pressing global problem. “The ultimate goal is to end world poverty,” said Niehaus. “This goal is within sight and is possible to reach in the next few decades.” The U.S. tax code places limits on the compensation that nonprofit employees receive and therefore effectively limits the maximum amount an employee can be paid even in the event of very strong performance.
Exhibit 1 Charity Watch Profile of American Red Cross
Source: Charity Watch. Copyright 2018 by American Institute of Philanthropy. Reprinted with permission.
EndNote
- “Regional aggregation using 2011 PPP and $1.9/day poverty line,” The World Bank: PovcalNet, accessed August 9, 2017, http://iresearch.worldbank.org/povcalnet/povDuplicateWB.aspx, and “FAQs: Global Poverty Line Update,” The World Bank, September 30, 2015, accessed August 9, 2017, http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/brief/global-poverty-line- faq. Ibid.
- “The Millennium Development Goals Report 2008,” United Nations, accessed August 9, 2017, http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/reports.shtml.
- Our Work In Africa. From American Red Cross Web site, http://www.redcross.org/images/MEDIA_ CustomProductCatalog/m8540129_2012-Africa-Overview.pdf, accessed February 2018.
- Richard Larkin, “Using Outcomes to Measure Nonprofit Success,” Nonprofit Quarterly, July 2, 2013, accessed August 9, 2017, https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2013/07/02/using-outcomes-to-measure-nonprofit-success.
- “GiveDirectly,” GiveWell, November 2016, accessed August 9, 2017, http://www.givewell.org/charities/give-directly.
- Haushofer, Johannes, and Jeremy Shapiro, “The Short-term Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers to the Poor: Experimental Evidence from Kenya,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 131, no. 4 (2016): 1973-2042.
- See, for example, David Kestenbaum, “What Happens When You Just Give Money to Poor People?” NPR, October 25, 2013, accessed November 14, 2017, https:// www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/10/25/240590433/what-happens-when-you-just- give-money-to-poor-people, and Annie Lowrey, “How No-Strings Aid Affects the Poor,” New York Times, October 25, 2013, accessed November 14, 2017, https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/how-no-strings-aid-affects-the-poor.
- ”The 2017 NPT Top 100,” The Nonprofit Times, November 1, 2017, accessed November 15, 2017, http://www.thenonprofittimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/NPT-TOP-100_NOVEMBER-1-17.pdf.
- “Incentive Pay Practices: Nonprofit/Government Organizations,” WorldatWork and Vivient Consulting, February 2016.
- GiveDirectly| International aid| Direct cash transfers| Philanthropy| Nonprofit organization| Poverty alleviation| Organizational success| Scaling up impact| Financial incentives| Employee motivation| Strategic decision-making| Transformational force| Charitable giving| Google.org| Facebook founders| Evidence-based programs| Bottom-line impact| Employee compensation| Nonprofit sector| Inflection point in development