To create recommendations of organizations working to change US national climate policy, we took the following steps:
Step 1: Identifying key “approaches” to policy-change We first created a list of “approaches” most commonly used by organizations working towards policy change. These included activism (grass-roots mobilization focused on political change), insider policy advocacy (lobbying and other forms of insider influence), influencing elections (direct involvement in campaigns and election efforts), litigation (bringing cases to court with potential for positive environmental outcomes), and communications (educating the public and advertising climate issues).
Step 2: Use the Importance, Tractability, and Neglectedness Framework to determine specific approaches to focus on for addressing US national climate policy We believe that each of the approaches listed above is an important part of working towards policy change because policy change rarely happens through only one approach alone. At the same time, some approaches may be in less need of additional funds than others or have a higher potential marginal impact of additional funds. For this reason, we adapted and applied the Importance, Tractability, and Neglectedness framework to determine which approaches we thought would be the most useful for us to focus our work on. The full methodology and results of this exercise are reported in our document How We Determined Our Research Priorities for Policy Change . Through this exercise, we determined that activism and insider policy advocacy were likely to have the largest marginal effect, and we focused on these areas for our 2020 and 2021 research. We hope to explore organizations in the other domains in future years.
Step 3: Desk research and expert interviews to create a “long list” of organizations To identify organizations that use activism and insider advocacy to impact climate policy, we conducted our own search for organizations and also reached out to experts in academia, policy, and philanthropy to seek their recommendations. Through this process, we created a longlist of organizations that we then filtered based on whether they emphasized the use of activist or insider advocacy methods in their work. Our longlist is not necessarily comprehensive, and we plan to add to it as we learn about new organizations doing great work.
Step 4: Narrow down the long list to a shortlist of high potential organizations that we want to research further After creating our longlist of organizations, we created a shortlist of organizations on which we wanted to conduct further research. This was done by first rapidly scanning each organizations’ websites to understand if they were indeed working to affect US national policy through activism or insider policy advocacy and to have a better sense of the scope of their work. At this step, we excluded organizations that only conduct their work via 501(c)(4) funds because Giving Green is only able to provide recommendations for non-political organizations.
During this step, we also decided not to conduct further research on the so-called “Big Greens”: Sierra Club, National Resources Defence Council, Environmental Defense Fund, and the World Resources Institute. Although these large environmental organizations fit the definition of the organizations we are looking to recommend and many experts we consulted spoke highly of their activities, we decided not to pursue further research on them for a couple of reasons. First, all the Big Greens have a wide environmental agenda, and generally it is not possible to donate specifically for climate change activities (see endnote 1). Second, the Big Greens tend to be very well-funded, which suggests that donor dollars may have higher leverage in smaller organizations. (Though we admit that just because an organization is well-funded does not necessarily mean it has low marginal effectiveness of additional donations.)
Step 5: Conduct shallow-dive analysis of each of the short-listed organizations For each of the organizations included on our shortlist, we undertook brief desk research to assess whether we thought each organization would be a promising candidate for further in-depth analysis by our team. In particular, we assessed each organization on the list using the following questions:
In some cases, we were unable to satisfactorily answer all of the above questions for each of the organizations we reviewed. In these cases, we noted which questions were outstanding and used this to think about whether a deep-dive analysis would be useful in order to seek answers to outstanding questions.
Step 6: Select organizations for deep-dive analyses Based on the findings of our shallow-dive analyses, we identified what we thought were the most promising recommendations based on our framework. These organizations were those that we believed are doing relevant work, had demonstrated meaningful accomplishments, and showed evidence of a strong organizational structure and potential financial need.
For these organizations, we conducted a comprehensive “deep dive” to gather more information with which to make a recommendation.
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