Grant Writing Confidential writes this regarding research used to evaluate charity effectiveness:

The research can be far more costly than the project, and as little as donors like not knowing whether their money is effective, they’re going to like it even less if you spend 50 — 80% of the project on evaluating it. This is why the situation donors say they want to change is likely to persist regardless of what is reported.

While the author is certainly correct about foundations not wanting 50% or more of the money they donate to a single charity to be spent on evaluation, it does bring up an interesting point: What if charities supported outside researchers to implement randomized control/longitudinal studies across all the charities they support? This would require the donors to convince the charities to work with the researchers. This is certainly doable and feasible given the millions of dollars that are spread out amongst all the charities they support. In short, there is a certain economies of scale that could make such evaluations worthwhile. This would take convincing, but it would not be impossible, and given the amount of money being spent, it would also make sense.

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