In this episode, Co-Founders of UI Charitable Aaron Miller and Todd Manwaring dive into a surprising truth — only 3% of donors vet the organizations they support. The conversation explores how transitioning from purely emotion-driven giving to a model that combines emotional connection with evidence-based, outcome-driven philanthropy can lead to more meaningful and enduring impact.

Key Moments & Timestamps

0:00 | Introduction

1:55 | Meet Aaron Miller
Introduction to Aaron Miller a Professor of Ethics and host of the Podcast “How to Help”

3:11 | Shift in the Podcast to Focus on High Impact Organizations
Todd explains an upcoming shift to focus on vetting and presenting organizations with proven impact.

4:23 | The Misconception of Giving (The Warm Glow Effect)
Aaron and Todd discuss how most giving is motivated by the good feeling we get, understanding the incentives behind giving, and how to focus on quality giving not just emotional giving.

9:26 | The Difference Between Opportunistic Giving to Strategic Giving
Aaron describes the difference between opportunistic and strategic giving. Todd describes how UI Charitable serves as a "financial advisor" for impact by vetting and curating high-impact organizations.

13:01 | Shifting From Charity to Change
Todd and Aaron entertain a shift in mindset from assuming all charities are good to viewing the giving process as purchasing change in people's lives, making effectiveness much more important.

18:00 | Understanding Change through Negative Consequences of Social Problems
Todd and Aaron explore how focusing on the outcomes of poverty, homelessness, and other issues helps clarify which solutions work.

20:28 | Poverty is Not a One Dimensional Problem
Aaron emphasizes that experiences of poverty vary widely and require nuanced, contextual solutions.

23:29 | The Evidence Behind Cash Transfers
Aaron breaks down why direct cash transfers work well in some regions but not others—and what that tells us about context-specific giving.

25:38 | Real Change in Action: Living Goods a Case Study
Todd shares how Living Goods pivoted their model after evaluation showed they weren’t having the intended health outcomes.

28:36 | Everyone Has a Unique Path to Contribute
Aaron shares insights from his podcast “How to Help” on how different people will give in different ways and how even seemingly mundane work can have lasting impact.

34:05 | Spotlight: New Incentives
Tanner Mills introduces New Incentives, an organization using conditional cash transfers to increase child vaccination rates in Nigeria.

36:22 | Listener Question: Where Can I Find More High Impact Groups? Jaxson Thomas shares how listeners can explore UI Charitable's vetted org database and subscribe to the newsletter.

Episode Transcript

Aaron Miller - The most common error that you see in people who are being generous is they see the making of the gift as the indicator of quality rather than the use of the gift as the indicator of quality. And so if the donation makes me feel good, Yes, therefore it was the right thing to do and had a good impact.

The reality, of course, is that's not the case.

Todd Manwaring - Less than 3% of donors actually take the time to learn more about the organizations they're going to give to you, trying to understand, are they effective?

If you're finding an organization that's actually helping people to change their lives to be better, then as a philanthropist, I'm buying that kind of change as opposed to, I'm giving charitably.

Jaxson Thomas - Welcome to the UI Charitable Impact Innovations podcast, where we elevate philanthropy to be more effective through learning, collaboration, and innovation. My name is Jaxson Thomas. I'm an impact analyst at UI Charitable and your host for today's podcast. This is the seventh episode of the podcast. You just heard a powerful preview from today's guest, Aaron Miller, a professor at BYU's Romney Institute and host of the podcast, “How to Help”.

Aaron brings deep insights into how we can get more effectively, avoid common donor pitfalls, and ask the critical question, is my donation actually making a difference?

In this conversation we break down what truly impactful giving looks like beyond just good intentions. And we don't just talk theory. Later in the episode, we spotlight a real world organization with proven impact, showing how these principles come to life.

And stick around to the end, we'll wrap up this episode with a great question from one of our listeners that you won't want to miss. Let's dive right in.

Todd Manwaring - Hello everyone. I'm your host, Todd Manwaring. Today we're visiting with Aaron Miller, who has a number of interesting relationships with us. A, he's one of the co-founders of UI Charitable. He's also our chair of our board of directors. And he's a good friend.

Been involved with the Ballard Center that I was involved with for many years and he hosts a podcast called “How to Help”. We're thrilled to have a professor here with us to help us talk about outcomes and talk about some of what we've been learning as we've been working on. How do we help people give more effectively?

Aaron Miller - I'm delighted to be here Todd, this is super fun.

Todd Manwaring - I could also mention Aaron's helped us try to figure out this podcasting piece because he does have this expertise. And so we're learning little by little how to do this better. And we're grateful for all the help that you provide here with us. 

Aaron Miller - Yeah, you guys are doing great. I don't think I helped all that much.

Todd Manwaring - One of the things that we're talking about today is we've had a huge amount of people connecting about our podcast who have been interested in really the vetting aspect of what we've been doing. So we've been talking about innovative kinds of activities and groups doing really interesting things. 

But we've also talked about different groups that we've vetted and basically are telling people who give, philanthropists, these are organizations that you can trust. They're having great outcomes. And so we're gonna be making a slight twist in our podcast and in the other groups that we share that we wanna make sure people know about today. So that's part of why we're talking. And I thought it would be good to have Aaron as a co-founder and also as a board member, of helping us talk through that a bit.

Aaron Miller - Yeah, as you know, this is something I learned to care deeply about because of all the time I spent with you, actually. So yeah, I'm excited we can talk about it.

Todd Manwaring - You know, we're just going to try to have a bit of a discussion here. But as you've been more and more involved in this world of social impact, what have you seen as you've interacted with organizations, as you've interacted with funders? Maybe there's some things you've learned as you've worked on your podcast and talking to people about how to have greater impact in their lives. What does that look like? What does that mean to you?

Aaron Miller - Yeah, it starts with one really simple idea, which is not taking for granted that impact is happening. And I think that's probably the most common error that you see in people who are being generous is they see the making of the gift as the indicator of quality rather than the use of the gift as the indicator of quality.

There's a concept that comes from economics, the sort of cynical term that only an economist could come up with, which is warm glow.

Todd Manwaring - Right, right.

Aaron Miller - And Jim Andreoni is the economist that came up with it. And he's not a cynical person at all. But the idea of warm glow is that one of the main motivations of why people give is because it makes us feel good.

And “feel good” can mean a lot of different things. It's not just like, you know, the warm fuzzy feeling you get of being generous. Warm glow can mean more than just that. But what he tapped into with that insight, and that's a phrase that kind of has become popular in a bunch of circles, what he did with that insight is he put a finger on incentives or giving that really kind of drive what this is about. 

When you go to the grocery store, you buy the food that matches your price quality desires, right? You go looking for the food that like the box of cereal that you prefer for breakfast every morning. And if it's on sale, you buy more of it. If it's not, you buy less of it. ⁓ You know, we sort of make these quality price decisions and trade offs all the time with the way we spend our money.

It tends to not be that way with donations because people use that warm glow feeling as a proxy for quality. And so if the donation makes me feel good, therefore it was good. And the research shows this, as far as most donors go when they think about the impact that they're giving. Did it make me feel good? Yes, therefore it was the right thing to do and had good impact.

The reality, of course, is that that's not the case.

There's, you know, for the last couple of decades, there's been this rapidly increasing trend to expect nonprofit organizations or other social impact organizations, government entities to do more measurement, to know that their programs or ideas or interventions are actually moving the needle in positive ways. And the problem is, is

Todd Manwaring - Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a really good point.

Aaron Miller - You don't go buy that at the grocery store, right? It's harder to connect the evidence that people are gathering on high-impact organizations and attach it to the actual giving decisions that people make. And that's part of the reason that I am so passionate about UI Charitable is because it helps make that connection for people. So when they go quote unquote shopping for a donation, they can shop in a way that results in higher quality, not just warm glow. You still get plenty of warm glow, I would argue you get more of it actually when you give to a high impact organization. But finding a way to do that sort of giving has been largely unavailable for a long long time.

Todd Manwaring - Yeah, no, that's really interesting. And I'd seen a recent research piece talking about the same concept of what's really going on in donors' minds as they, as they think about their giving and mentioned the same thing that predominantly what most people are getting from it is this warm glow. And it mentioned something quite interesting. It described that less than 3% of donors actually take the time to learn more about the organizations they're going to give to you, trying to understand, are they effective?

Even doing the shopping, I guess, like you just mentioned, right? And so the 97% are really just saying, oh, this is a group I've given to in the past. And in some ways, this halo effect. I mean, that's another concept created about 40 years ago.

Someone kind of described how we can have halos around for-profit businesses. And these occur also in the nonprofit space where we give some kind of a morality, kind of ⁓ an assessment to a group that, this must be morally correct. So it's gotta be good. You know, in fact, I hear that from a lot of people. “Well, they're trying to do good, so it must be good, you know?”

Aaron Miller - Yeah, I think one of the reasons that donors don't do a lot of research ahead of time with their giving is again because quality disconnect with the purchase and it's one of the reasons and others have called this behavior opportunistic giving which makes it sound selfish and that's not what the term means. What it means is that most people when they give are giving based on the requests that come to them rather than deliberately seeking out ways to give that fit with their values, right?

Todd Manwaring - Mm-hmm. Right.

Aaron Miller - Like, I give because a solicitor knocked on my door like a kid in my neighborhood raising money for his soccer team, right? Or I give because they're running a giving program at work and they asked me to sign up for a year of giving to United Way or whatever. And so it's not that I ever actively seek out opportunities to give, but it's just that when they come, I sort of think, well, how much have I got in my bank account? You know, I'm sure. And then I'll give the 30 bucks or whatever.

Todd Manwaring - Yeah, right.

Aaron Miller - And that’s sort of the opposite of strategy, right? Like if you want to be strategic about your giving, means doing some research, exploring some organizations, getting advice from experts.

People invest this way, not opportunistically, but strategically. The reason financial advisors are a massive industry and the reason people rely on them so heavily when they have a of invested resources to manage is because you need that sort of expertise, you need that sort of insight ⁓ and that sort of strategic approach to investing effectively. Giving has a lot of the same complications.

Todd Manwaring - Yeah, which is interesting because really people could be doing their own investing research and spending that time learning how to do it, but they've offloaded that to someone. And in some ways we're saying, hey, if you're in the same spot, you could be doing the research, you could be digging in, but we're going to try to provide a service to you, which is helping you understand, these are the hundred organizations, these are the 500 organizations. This is our plan anyway, to provide a list where people can come and search. Here's, you know, I'm interested in this country. What are the vetted organizations in that country? I'm interested in this social issue. Help me understand which organizations are vetted there. And, and really trying to be that financial advisor, but in this case, a philanthropic advisor, right? We're trying to fill that role. Yeah.

Aaron Miller - Yeah, that's right. And when you look at the super wealthy people that are engaged in philanthropy, like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and others, they've done this thing that we're talking about, but they've built their own institutions. 

Just like really wealthy individuals create family offices to manage their investments where they bring in experts and have capable, sophisticated strategies that come from having experts guide that process. And really, really wealthy people have been able to do that as well in philanthropy. I mean the Gates Foundation is massive, not just in terms of how much money they give, but in this number of employees they have and the amount of expertise that's there.

The problem is for sort of the rest of us who aren't multi-billionaires, there haven't always been a lot of like handy resources the way that there are I mean, most people could go get a financial advisor to help them manage their retirement, but there hasn't been an equivalent to that when it comes to charitable giving.

Todd Manwaring - Right. No, that's really important. So here's an interesting thought for me, if you go back to our first episode, one of the things we were trying to help describe was a charitable mindset that most of us are born into. Our families think this way, our neighbors think this way. learn a charitable mindset at our church or at our school or like you said, at work. 

And so, we get into this arena where we're focused on a charitable giving approach, which tends to, you know, tie to that warm glow kind of concept rather than thinking about this from an effectiveness perspective. And one way I've been trying to describe this to people lately is, you know, what if we didn't think about these organizations as charitable organizations?

In fact, in our world at UI Charitable, we work with organizations that are for-profit entities or they're hybrids of for-profit and nonprofit. And really what we're not looking for is charity. We're looking for change.

And we're trying to help donors think about instead of giving charitably, what you're actually doing is purchasing if you're finding an effective organization that's actually helping people in their lives and helping them to change their lives to be better, to be healthier, to be building assets through education and different kinds of means, then as a philanthropist, I'm buying that kind of change as opposed to, I'm giving charitably.

It's a different kind of mindset and thinking through between those two kinds of concepts, right.

Aaron Miller - Yeah, it's really true. When I talk with my students about the idea of warm glow and why we prefer warm glow where it comes from, there's an underlying concept to warm glow that goes from econ to psychology. And it's an idea that Jonathan Height and Dr. Keltner and a few others have studied called moral beauty.

And the idea of moral beauty is that we find things beautiful that are morally uplifting. And one of the most morally uplifting things we can encounter is a change for the better in somebody's life. Meaning that some good thing was done by somebody that led to a positive change in somebody else's life so that their life is better off now because of it. 

And in fact, according to one study by Keltner, is one of the most resonant forms of beauty globally. Meaning that like you go anywhere in the world you're gonna find people who experience this idea of moral beauty, who see an act of generosity leading to a positive impact in somebody else's life is truly beautiful. And it's just a universal thing to us.

Todd Manwaring - Right.

Aaron Miller - And that's where the change idea I think fits so beautifully, right? Because if we go from just the feeling of giving beyond that to the impact of the gift, that's where moral beauty has its greatest power, right? And it's the reason like these, you know, social media clips of somebody rescuing a dog from a river, they connect with us, right? And it's just part of being a human

Todd Manwaring - Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Miller - And you know, but everybody would be sad if they knew that the dog wandered back in the river three minutes later and died, right? The change has to be real. can't just be staged or fake.

Todd Manwaring - Yeah. You know, I saw just what you mentioned. We held an event here locally for a number of our supporters of this program at The Other Side Academy a few months ago. And what I heard from every one of the attendees is exactly what you mentioned, because we were there for dinner. 

We were eating with these convicts who were at The Other Side Academy working on changing their lives. And everybody that we brought there told me afterwards, those were incredible stories. Here's someone who's been on average arrested 25 times. They've been in prison, they've been in jails and hearing that kind of a story, it is, it's uplifting and helps us realize I could change. I could be that kind of thing.

Aaron Miller - What it does is it's like we, some of these big intractable problems like recidivism, you know, just feels like, well, people are people and, know, and like leopards don't change their spots, you know, sort of an idea, right? But people aren't leopards and people can change and given the right resources and opportunities, people do change all the time. And creating opportunities for that is, what's so enriching when you get, when you see it all the way through to the end, right?

Todd Manwaring - Yeah. One of the things that we do here at UI Charitable is as we look at organizations, we're really trying to look past what they do. What they do is so important. It's something we want to understand, but what we more deeply want to understand is what they're doing causing a change in this person's life. 

And so one of the ways we vet these groups is we vet them for these outcomes. We really want to understand, this group is working people in poverty. Is it helping them to get their kids in school? Is it helping them to change their life by having a safer home? We are working in a different space. It's the same kind of thing. We're trying to understand that change. 

And one of the ways we do that here is by looking at the negative consequences of that social problem. The negative consequences of poverty is that, well, yeah, obviously that person is poorer, but the primary negative consequence is that, well, they're not as healthy. A negative consequence is, the kids aren't in school. A negative consequence is they don't have savings. in more debt. There's more violence in their life, right? There's all of these things. 

The same could be true when we talk about homelessness. We talk about chronic homelessness, then what we're doing is we're trying to take a look at, what are the consequences of that? And we start to realize, ⁓ people who are homeless, on average, they're dying some 25 years earlier than us because they're unhealthier, because they're victims. Sometimes they're also perpetuating violence, you know, but they're in and out of the ER, they're in and out of prison themselves. 

But what we're really trying to understand is, so this program that's working on homelessness or working on is what they're doing changing those consequences? And that's what we really consider the most important kind of outcomes as we vet these organizations.

I'm just curious about your perspective and maybe how you see that playing out in organizations or maybe even as it plays out in students understanding this kind of concept.

Aaron Miller - Yeah, I think one of the greatest benefits of thinking in terms of negative consequences is it helps us break apart what we teach here as monoliths, like a big solid sort of like mysterious things, right? Poverty is a great example of a monolith. It's like the best example of a monolith, right? Like when we talk about poverty as just poverty, it's this bit.

Todd Manwaring - It's so complex.

Aaron Miller - Yeah, it's gigantic. It's overwhelming.It's mysterious to us. It's impenetrable. Like, how do you ever really solve it? It just feels impossible. 

But when you start to, but it's not that way, right? Poverty has all these like components that it has all these aspects and details to it. And they're going to be different for one person than they are for another. And when you're looking at the actual negative consequences of these big monolithic things like poverty, you're paying much more attention to the detail and I would add you're paying much more attention to the person because one of the problems with monolithic thinking when we treat poverty is just one thing.

We also treat everybody experiencing it as the same. And that's not even close to true. Somebody experiencing poverty in an inner city in Dallas is having a totally different experience with poverty than somebody in slums outside of Dhaka and Bangladesh who's also having a totally different experience than somebody who's living in remote rural Sub-Saharan Africa. 

And you can't lump all those people together and just call them poor because you're ignoring the details of their experience, you're ignoring what their life is like, and then the result too is you're ignoring what solutions would work best for each of the people I was talking about and they're going to be different for all three of them.

Todd Manwaring - Right. That's really a good point. In fact, in the kind of the way you describe it, when it is monolithic like that, because it is so complex and it seems impenetrable, then we tend to do things like, well, they're in poverty because they're poor. So they get out of poverty if they have money. And yet what we want to understand is, okay, you've helped them. Maybe you've helped them get a job. So they do have more income. 

We want to know if they are using that income to change their life, right? So it takes that next step. And like you're saying, ⁓ in this location where this group of people are at in their context, the most important thing is healthcare because there's just such a lack of access to it. 

But for this group in poverty, the real issue is opportunity for their kid getting involved in you know, after school kind of activities or something. And, is that something they can do or because the parents are working two or three jobs? No, I've got to come home because I've got to take care of my siblings, you know, or whatever it might be, right? Yeah, I like how you're mentioning that.

Aaron Miller - Yeah, I think one of my favorite examples of this idea is the release of poverty and monoliths and everything is the evidence that's been gathered by really smart researchers on something called direct cash transfers. I know you're really familiar with these, but I'll explain like a direct cash transfer is basically just giving money to somebody. And the question is, does that work?

Well, if you think about poverty as a monolith, you just sort of say, well, like, should I give people money or not? And if they're poor, yes or no, do I give money? But the reality is a lot more nuanced. And so there's a lot of research, hundreds of studies on direct cash transfers, for example, in sub-Saharan Africa. And not all of them, but most of them point to this being effective, like just giving money to people, especially in rural communities. And in Africa, tends to work pretty well and it works in the ways we're talking about by reducing negative consequences. Their kids are more likely to get an education, their health improves, their businesses, however their income streams become more sustainable over time. 

On the other hand, if you do direct cash transfers in the United States, the evidence is a lot less positive. Like there's a big study done with a cash transfer program in Denver, for example, and it was kind of like, meh, you know, it wasn't nearly as strong as what you see elsewhere. 

And that's as simple as it gets, right? Like it's just, does giving people money work? And the answer is, well, it depends. And that's the problem, is that it depends in a lot of contexts. And so this is why the expertise matters, because if you want that change, that positive change to happen that reduces the negative consequences, you have to think about this in smart and particular ways. And it's hard for individuals to have all that expertise. And that's why it's great to have resources that help you understand it.

Todd Manwaring - Right. Yeah, and that makes so much sense because of what we've been talking about. You know, we've got people kind of putting halos on organizations themselves. We also get people placing halos on direct cash transfer as a solution. Oh, it worked here. It must work everywhere.

Yeah, one of the things I really like about this concept is it helps us really recognize that solutions can fall in that same trap. Which is, we can put halos around those kinds of things. 

And one of my favorite groups that we vetted is a group called Living Goods. What they've been focused on is trying to bring community healthcare workers into sub-Saharan Africa you were just talking about. And the overwhelming perspective is, oh if you have a community healthcare worker, it's really going to help, especially with prenatal care.

So helping a mother before her pregnancy, making sure she's being checked on, making sure people are looking for any problems, and also the postnatal care that would occur. Living Goods kind of fell into that same They joined this kind of movement. They brought community health workers into the space.

And then somebody actually did an evaluation looking at them and another community healthcare working group and found out actually you're not helping with healthcare. There's no benefit to you being here. And what I love though about this story is Living Goods then took that and said, well, what do we need to change? What is it that we need to do with our solution that

in some ways had become itself, right? It had become this thing that we kind of worshiped a little bit. Every one of these works, and instead they took it apart and said, we're gonna approach community health care work this way. And then they had another evaluation a few years later showing that they were actually improving, again, people's lives. 

And so I love how that organization went through this process of assuming it must work, to learning it didn't, and then changing their solution. Really, in some ways it follows the same kind of notion of what we've been talking about with donors. These practitioners can get trapped into the same kind of sense of things. Oh, this must work because it seems to work everywhere else, kind of thing.

Aaron Miller - Yeah, I think smartphones are a cool analogy for that. so many people on the planet Earth have a smartphone right now. But if you looked at every individual person's smartphone, they'd all be different, different apps, different arrangements, different use cases. Like, you know, it sort of papers over the idea that this is a one size fits all solution because it's not one size. What makes it work is that it's so adaptable to each individual person's circumstances.

We are too quick to think of these like silver bullet kind of solutions to things. They just don't work that way.

Todd Manwaring - Right. I love how you mentioned that. Well, as we kind of wrap this up, one thing I'd like to do is just have you share a little bit about what your podcast is, “How to Help”, what you're trying to do. You know, what are you learning from people as you interact with experts in the field being, you know, someone who engages in the world in a better way?

What would you share there?

Aaron Miller - I found that storytelling is a really powerful way for people to learn lessons for themselves. And I've really enjoyed having guests on my show who have been able to tell stories about the way that they contribute to the world that's unique and what you learn if you go through the catalog of them. Right. 

And this is true whether I'm interviewing a professor who's a research expert in humility and CEO of the West Africa AIDS Foundation, right? Like I've got a lot of different kinds of people that are having a really big impact in the world, whether through their scholarship or through their direct action. 

The stories of how people arrive at what helps them make their unique contribution are all just, I don't want to say all over the place in the sense that they're messy, but they're all so varied and really beautiful in kind of intricate ways. And the reason I like that idea as it relates to this conversation is because we all have ways to contribute that are meaningful. And it can be through our giving, but not everybody's gonna give in the same way even, right? Like different people are gonna find a cause that matters to them, a way that they can improve somebody's life and they're gonna engage in that in a really impactful way.

And we can take what to us seems like a mundane thing and turn it into an impact thing when we think more deeply about it. I interviewed the CEO of Otter Products, the company that makes cell phone cases. And he built not only a really ethical culture, but has found ways for them to have a really cool impact in emergency response, for example. Taking what would just be a normal cell phone case company and turning it into something more.

And what I've learned is that we all have ways to take our mundane lives and turn them into something more. We all have ways of doing that.

And, you know, it's true for philanthropy too. I think of, for example, Cecilia Conrad, was an econ professor and a university administrator. Now she runs a group called Lever for Change, which is helping high-end, like very large philanthropic efforts have more impact and doing it in a way that, I mean, she advised Mackenzie Scott on, you know, billions of dollars of high-impact giving in a way and at a scale that nobody had done before. 

We all have ways to do this if we just keep following that instinct that's sort of like saying I have a way to contribute and make a change in the world that's unique to me. That opportunity will come and the sort of path will reveal itself as you keep walking along it. And so I think for me it takes you know these really important ideas about how we measure impact, how we think about it, and all these interviews have translated into these stories all can play out in unique but really amazing ways that we all can learn and benefit from. So that, I think, to me has been a really moving part of the experience of doing “How to Help” is that it's helped me kind of get a broad perspective on this idea that we all have ways to make people's lives better and it's not always going to be obvious what it is at the start, it's going to be something that in the end is going to make a huge difference in other people's lives and that's very rewarding.

Todd Manwaring - I like that. And it ties to what we just talked about. That's really more about change. How am I changing someone's life? How am I helping that being better as opposed to I'm being charitable and I see them as somebody in need. It's more, oh, this is the way I can benefit the world.

As we wrap up, I hope that our listeners get the sense. Yeah, we're making a slight shift. You're going to still see us connecting on this podcast with many of the groups that we are vetting. 

We'll also be bringing people in like Aaron and others who are focused on these perspectives of how do you look at good outcomes? How do you vet organizations and what does that look like? And so you'll find what we're doing, you know, not dissimilar at all from our first few episodes, but really bringing in more of an emphasis on how you as a donor, as a philanthropist, as someone who's giving part of your life, whether it's funds or maybe it's volunteering, how you can approach that differently. 

So we're so excited to have you here. Thanks for helping make us ⁓ a great podcast. We're excited about where we've been and we're excited.

Please share this with your friends and tell them more about where we're at. And Aaron, thanks again for being with us today.

Aaron Miller - Thanks Todd, it's always a pleasure. I appreciate the opportunity too.

Tanner Mills - This is your co-host Tanner Mills with this month's Impact Opportunity. Today we're highlighting an organization called New Incentives. In Northern Nigeria, children mortality rates remain very high, among the highest in the world, and millions of children and infants are dying each year from diseases that can be prevented with routine vaccinations. 

Despite the availability of vaccines through government programs, vaccine rates remain very low. Many caregivers do not have access to information about vaccines, while others face serious logistical barriers like transportation costs, time off of work, and even health system mistrust, resulting in millions of children remaining vulnerable to preventable

diseases. New Incentives is tackling this problem with a simple and powerful solution, conditional cash transfers. These cash transfers encourage caregivers to vaccinate their children. Caregivers receive small cash incentives for bringing their infants to local clinics for routine immunizations. The program supports government-provided vaccines so there's no duplication.

New Incentives also works closely with health officials to strengthen vaccine delivery and ensure reliable clinic operations.

The results are clear and compelling. Studies have found that through this program, children are 27% more likely to be fully immunized. The program is highly cost effective and is among the most impactful global health interventions available. Since 2017, New Incentives has reached over 1 million infants and continues to expand across Nigeria with plans to reach millions and millions of more.

New Incentives is a 501(c)(3) registered entity and offers vaccines to children and families at no cost. And you can donate directly at newincentives.org/donate. Or if you'd like to fund this work through your donor advised fund at UI Charitable, you can find them through your portal account. Or you can reach out to us at impact@uicharitbale.org and we will help you make this happen.

Jaxson Thomas - This is the Impact Inbox. In this segment, we feature one question from a member of our community. This episode's question reads,

“I love hearing about groups that I can donate to that are making a real difference in people's lives. Where can I find more of these groups?”

That's a great question. Thanks for that. As Todd and Aaron talked about today, it's so much more fulfilling to give when you know your donation is making a proven difference. No more guessing or hoping, just real measurable impact in the lives of real people.

We will continue to roll out this new focus of our podcast on vetted high impact groups. And if you're looking to discover more of them, we've got a couple easy ways to help. 

Number one, you can subscribe to our monthly newsletter. Each month we feature two new vetted organizations we're most excited about, along with insights and any other updates about the podcast. To sign up, just email us at impact@uicharitable.org or click the subscribe link in the podcast description. The second way is you can explore our growing database of vetted organizations. so you don't have to dig through endless websites or vague charity ratings.

These are organizations that have evidence of effectiveness, not just good marketing. You can browse our live curated list at the link in the podcast description below. And we're adding every single month as we continue to vet them. So keep checking in to see more.

Thank you for joining us for the UI Charitable Impact Innovations podcast. We hope today's conversation inspires you to approach philanthropy with more intention, strategy, and effectiveness in a way that you can truly feel confident you are making a difference. Please subscribe and leave a review on Apple podcasts and Spotify and share this with others you know who are interested in finding great. All of this helps our podcast grow.

To continue the conversation or if you have questions about your grant making, impact investing, or impact measurement, get in touch with us by emailing us at impact@uicharitable.org 

Thanks, and we'll see you next time.

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