How much is a dollar worth to a GiveWell accountant? With Daisy Hao

While most of our members are strategy and management consultants, a significant number have consulting expertise in accounting, financial management, data science, and other areas. For EY alum and accounting whiz Daisy Hao, diligence and transparency are everything. Today she spoke with us about her current work as a controller at GiveWell, keeping one of the world’s most transparent, life-saving nonprofits accountable. 

Consultants for Impact: GiveWell stands out for a lot of reasons. They have a strong reputation for finding opportunities for donors to leverage their dollars best to meaningfully improve outcomes for people's well-being. We're curious about what GiveWell is like from the inside. What are you guys working on or thinking about now as a team?

Daisy Hao: My day-to-day work is pretty siloed within finance and accounting, but the new work at the organization I’m most excited about is our organization's research. GiveWell is hyper-transparent and open across our sub-teams, so I’m always curious to listen to our research team’s latest findings in all-staff meetings.

The breadth and thoroughness of their research always resonate with me. What I find really fascinating are grants we're doing outside of our Top Charities, which are typically funded from our All Grants Fund or our Unrestricted Fund.

Can you share an example of this type of grant?

Most recently, in our August blog, we posted about a grant to provide eyeglasses to working-age adults with vision problems. As someone with poor vision, I can really relate to that. Not being able to see clearly, or only being able to read something when it's very close to your face, can be debilitating for people going about their daily lives.

What's exciting about this grant is that it's not just focused on our usual areas like medicine to prevent malaria or providing bed nets. It's more of a grant that other grants can build on. One of the main goals is to gather more information about how cost-effective eyeglasses are for people's well-being, such as how many people are impacted and to what degree. This preliminary grant will then inform future granting decisions, like a form of meta-granting.

Using grants as a source of information or discovery is really interesting.

Yeah, it's very forward-thinking. In the early days at GiveWell, we've primarily focused on addressing grants where we have high confidence in their cost-effectiveness. We're lucky to now have the capacity, in terms of people and donations to our All Grants Fund and Unrestricted Fund, to fund opportunities that are more uncertain or riskier than our Top Charities.

How does excellence in accounting play into what GiveWell does and grow its ability to help?

When I think about accounting at GiveWell, it's like accounting anywhere - there are specific roles, and you have to follow GAAP guidelines. What is different and new for me is that we incorporate our core values of transparency and truth-seeking into accounting and auditing.

We share more information with stakeholders than we have to. In my past consulting career, if you weren't required to share something, you wouldn't. I'm always surprised by GiveWell's level of transparency and how it affects our work. Being that level of transparent informs the sophistication and accuracy of the accounting - if you're telling people all this information, you have to be sure it's 100% correct. Because we're all mission-driven, we're all trying to achieve excellence in our expertise. We know that excelling in our own areas helps the organization as a whole.

We had never thought about accounting as a part of a shared truth-seeking exercise. Can you paint us a picture of how this looks day to day? 

We have a policy called the Excess Assets Policy, where we utilize unrestricted funding for granting purposes. All the funds we use for operations were specifically donated for operations. We're lucky that our donors are generous, so we have a surplus of operating funds. But we're not looking to build an endowment to ensure our future existence - that doesn't align with our mission. Each year, we assess our liquidity and budget to ensure we can operate for the next two years. Anything beyond that, we grant out.

What matters is stewardship of the funds. As part of the operations team, we try to make everything as efficient and coherent as possible, being good stewards by helping the rest of the organization do their best.

Your choice of the word "coherent" suggests both a sense of “value coherency” and “operational coherency,” prioritizing clarity and attention to detail.

Right. We're also transparent about mistakes. We have a mistakes blog on our website where we acknowledge errors. Internally, we have a culture of openness about professional and personal mistakes.

In consulting, there's often pressure not to mess up in front of the client or to help the client minimize their mistakes. What was the shift like for you, stepping into a space where you acknowledge mistakes publicly?

Admitting mistakes goes hand in hand with expressing a (healthy)  lack of confidence. It's not only "Hey, I made a mistake" and "I'll do better next time." It's also about acknowledging uncertainty in our decision-making, like saying, "I'm only 85% sure this is the right decision."

In consulting, you never want to tell the client, "I've only researched this for two hours." You wouldn't typically share your confidence level or who you've consulted with. We would present information as if it was given from on high. At GiveWell, it's different. People value transparency, even to the extent where you can say, "I don't like this, and I don't have good reasons why, but it doesn't seem right to me." 

Could you talk us through your transition process from EY to GiveWell? We know many people in places like EY feel they could go anywhere afterward but then feel uncertain about where to choose.

I had heard the war stories about leaving big firms and I knew I didn’t want to just do the same tasks every day for the rest of my life! But I had the privilege of knowing what I wanted before the Big Four, so it was less painful for me. But when I was leaving, people would ask where I was going, expecting another industry. When I told them, they were surprised and wondered how I even found that opportunity.

The position at GiveWell was enticing because it offered direct impact. The timing was also good because GiveWell was contracting out its accounting and bookkeeping, so it was hiring now to bring everything in-house and increase efficiency.  

A massive plus for me, actually, is that at GiveWell, no day looks the same. My job doesn't feel repetitive like it might in another industry. The more I was exposed to what we were doing and absorbed the internal culture, the more I felt bought into it.

We love that you went in with a hypothesis about GiveWell or something similar. That's what we recommend - having a directional sense can be really empowering, even if you learn something new and update your hypothesis later.

I've always wanted to work in nonprofit or governmental accounting. In college, I wanted to do something impactful or in a regulatory body. I initially went to a Big Four firm to gain technical skills and experience.

When I felt I had maximized my experiences there, I wanted a change. I wasn't sure exactly what I was looking for, so I explored various options. I even considered private equity, thinking I could earn money to later direct towards impactful causes.

Was there anything you missed from EY's culture when you left?

I miss the people. There's something endearing about suffering through a busy season together. Some of my best memories are from arguably the worst times - working super long hours and being stressed. We had cute moments, like changing into pajamas after clients left and working until 10 or 11 p.m.

Here at Consultants for Impact, we think a lot about the power law distribution of impact among nonprofits and how some are exponentially more impactful than others. How did that factor in for you when choosing GiveWell?

I learned about GiveWell early on, and it shaped my opinions about impact. A family member working at GiveWell introduced me to their mission and cost-effectiveness approach. As a nerdy accountant, that optimization and power of a dollar concept appealed to me. GiveWell was presented as a shining star in terms of impact. For me, it was about pure analytics and the concrete idea of saving lives and improving wellbeing as the most cost-effective use of money.

Can you elaborate on the power of the dollar?

The power of a dollar depends on who has it and how it's spent. As part of onboarding, GiveWell sends new employees several books, some of them with an emphasis on effective giving. One point that struck me in one of these books was how intense global poverty is – more than I had realized. A relatively small amount of money that might buy a discretionary item for me could actually save a life elsewhere. Even $5 could significantly improve someone's well-being in another part of the world.

That's a heavy realization. How do you find support and motivation and set boundaries around engaging with these issues?

It goes both ways. There's the heaviness of constantly thinking about these issues, which can lead to decision fatigue. I view my job as impactful, which can create guilt when I want to log off for the day. I balance this by being optimistic and confident that what I'm doing is helpful. I rationalize that I'm doing one of the better options for me personally to address suffering in the world, using my specific skill set.

Regarding work-life balance, it's about planning and realizing that small day-to-day decisions won't make or break situations. What's more important is sticking to a strategy and mission plan. It's about having a big-picture strategy rather than getting caught up in every little thing.

That's probably a critical sanity boost, regardless of the organization. The trick with impact work is that you can get personally invested. But falling back on the structure of the organization, whether it's strategy or team, provides support for balance.

Absolutely. It boils down to faith in other people working on this. When I do finance onboarding for new hires, I get to meet everyone. People often mention how nice and friendly everyone is. Being earnest and mission-driven lets me see how others at GiveWell are highly competent and motivated. I can rest easy knowing they're doing everything to the best of their abilities.