About the impact of your donations

Why should I care about impact?

You should care a lot about the impact of your donations. Do you want your donation to help one person, 10 people or 100 people? Charities can vary enormously in the impact they have for a given donation. The impact of donations to Whisper is unusually high.

How do you measure the impact of donations to Whisper?

We use two main measures of impact:

• how many patients your donation can treat
• how many lives your donation can save that would not otherwise have been saved

So, how many patients can my donation treat?

On average we can treat a patient for every $28.26 in donated funds. An average number like this hides a lot of detail, but it can still be helpful when comparing one charity with another.

 How we calculated this:

In Whisper's last financial year 2022-2023, we saw 11,429 patients. We received $390,900 in donations and drawdowns of reserves of which $67,900 was donations designated for the ambulance purchase and child sponsorships, leaving $323,100 for the hospital's running costs. To find the cost in donated funds per patient, we divided the hospital running costs by the number of patients.

And how many lives can my donation save?

We estimate that we save a life that would not otherwise have been saved for every $363 in donated funds.

 How we calculated this:

Whisper's hospital saves a lot of lives, but some of those lives might have been saved anyway if Whisper didn't exist. For example if Whisper didn't exist, our staff might be working at other hospitals in the local area and they would be saving some lives there. So the important question is: how many lives can your donation save that wouldn't otherwise have been saved?

To estimate this, we took the donations that went towards hospital running costs, and divided them by two thirds of the number of transfused patients. This is because, as is often the case in sub-Saharan Africa, many child patients that Whisper sees require a life-saving blood transfusion, but at other hospitals in the area, transfusions can be very hard to obtain, particularly during the COVID lockdowns. The calculation gives $363 per life saved.

How does that compare to other charities?

$363 per life saved is amazing. It compares extremely well to other charities.

For example, programs that donate bed nets to prevent malaria are considered to have an exceptionally high impact; the charity effectiveness specialists at Givewell estimate that those programs save a life for every $3,299 donated.

Why is Whisper's impact so high?

There are several reasons why Whisper's impact is so high:

• Uganda is a low-cost country so your money goes much further
• In Uganda the treatment side of medicine is relatively neglected by aid agencies compared to preventive medicine, so there are more high-impact things left for us to do. For example, the percentage of children covered by immunization is not much lower than in the USA, but an emergency blood transfusion can be hard to find.
• Our hospital accepts inpatients and has full 24 hour medical cover. If we only accepted outpatients, we would save fewer lives.
• We emphasize quality. Medicine is teamwork and is only as good as the weakest link; drugs have to be in stock, standby generators have to work when needed.
• We have a presence in Uganda to ensure that your money is spent where it's most needed
• Our spending on fundraising and advertizing is very low. Please help to keep it that way by sharing our posts on social media!

But you left out capital spending?

We think that leaving out capital spending gives a fairer picture of the current impact of your donations.

Whisper spent around $260,000 setting up its hospital and buying equipment; the money for that came from specific campaigns and donations designated for capital spending. It's important to consider capital spending when looking at the charity's overall effectiveness, for example if you're thinking of setting up another charity like Whisper. Including the cost of that capital spending, spread over 5 years, gives a total cost of about $30.54 in donated funds per patient and $393 per life saved. But we certainly don't expect to spend $260,000 all over again at the end of 5 years just to maintain our existing hospital.

And what about the fees that most patients pay?

Like other charity hospitals, Whisper charges fees for its services, although the fees are capped, they are set at a level that most people can afford and we don't turn children away. The average fee income per patient in our last financial year 2022-23 was $21.70. The reason we haven't included this fee income in our calculations is that the alternatives to Whisper's hospital also charge fees. For simplicity we've assumed that Whisper's fees are on average similar to the alternatives.

Would you like to make a high-impact donation?