How we score, and what we refuse to score

There is no return on investment on a soul. Scripture is direct about who causes growth: one plants, another waters, God gives the increase (1 Corinthians 3:6–7). Nothing here measures conversion, discipleship or spiritual fruit, and a ministry that reports large numbers of decisions is not thereby a better use of money.

What can be measured is narrower and still worth measuring: money in, work delivered, and whether the ministry tells the truth about both. Faithful stewardship of what we have been entrusted with is commanded (Luke 16:10–11). Predicting God’s harvest is not our business.

Cost per outcome is the ministry’s own reported spending for a fiscal year divided by its own reported count of what it delivered in that year. Both numbers link to the document they came from. Three things are always true about the result:

• It is an average, not a price. The next gift may buy more or less than the last one did. It is not a purchase, and no ministry owes you the outcome you divided for.
• Shared costs are charged to one outcome. A hospital that performs surgery also runs clinics and chaplaincy out of the same budget. Charging every program dollar to surgeries overstates what a surgery costs — which is why the figure is labelled as an upper bound, and why alternate denominators are listed beside it.
• Counts are self-reported. Audits cover the money, almost never the outcome count. No cause here has had its outcome numbers checked by anyone independent.

The denominator is often not the number the ministry leads with, and when it is not, the page says so in those words. A headline count is usually the broadest one available — people reached, students impacted, presentations made — and dividing a ministry’s budget by work that other people paid for produces a flattering figure that is not a price. So the denominator we use has to be something the ministry’s own money delivered. Literacy & Evangelism International reports 71,112 new readers, taught in classrooms run by seventeen autonomous organisations whose budgets are nowhere in its accounts; we divide by the 995 teachers it trained itself, and the figure goes from $11 to $813. Medical Teams International reports 6.3 million people with access to care, which counts a person inside a clinic’s catchment area whether or not they ever walked in; we divide by the children it treated for malnutrition, and the figure goes from $11 to $703. In every such case the ministry’s own headline stays on the page as an alternate, with its own arithmetic, so you can see the whole range rather than our choice within it.

Where a ministry advertises a price but publishes nothing to divide, we quote the price and say so in those words. The figure stays on the page because it is what the ministry is asking you to believe; it is labelled as unchecked because that is what it is. We do not turn a marketing number into a denominator and hand it back to you as arithmetic.

Where a ministry advertises a price and we can divide out our own, we print both — but only when the two are about the same thing. Asia Harvest advertises $3.00 per Bible printed, and what we can divide out is $833 per evangelist supported for a year. Both are true, and neither is a check on the other, so setting them side by side as though one tested the other would accuse a ministry of an overstatement it never made. When the units differ the page says so in those words instead.

Cost per outcome is also not comparable across different kinds of work. A Bible placed and a spinal surgery are not competing purchases, and ranking them against each other would be arithmetic doing the work of discernment. That is why the board on the front page shows the furthest-going ministry within each kind of work rather than one winner overall: a single list would be topped by whichever unit is cheapest to count, every time, at every amount.

Every cause page names the mechanism that makes the work cheaper than the same work in a high-income country — local wages instead of sent staff, a well that keeps producing for years, a film that costs nothing to show again, training that multiplies without more money. The mechanism is the argument. Any number attached to it is support, not proof.

The one number we can source everywhere is the cost base: national income per person, from the World Bank, against the United States. It is 370 times lower in Burundi, 148 times lower in Malawi and 79 times lower in Uganda. That is a real and enormous difference in what a wage, a bag of cement or a nurse’s day costs — and it is the honest core of “$1 goes further here.”

It is also not an efficiency score. A cheap country is not the same as a good ministry, and a 370× cost base does not mean your gift accomplishes 370 times as much. Poor countries are harder places to work: logistics cost more, equipment is imported at a premium, and oversight is thinner. The ratio tells you why the ceiling is higher. Whether a particular ministry reaches it is what the rest of its page is about.

Each cause states the biblical mandate the work sits on, with the passages quoted so you can weigh them yourself rather than take our summary for it. This is a judgement about the kind of work being done — feeding, healing, translating, sending, defending the fatherless — not a measurement of its results.

We also write down our reservations, including the ones a ministry would rather we left out: where a statement of faith is missing, where care could become the price of a hearing, where a model is contested among Christians who do this work for a living. A page with no reservations listed means we found none, which is rarer than it sounds.

Scores are our own reading of public documents — a desk review, not an audit and not a site visit. Where we did not look, the score is blank rather than zero.

Moving a cause up a level takes work we have not done yet: pulling the Form 990 and reconciling it against the annual report, asking the ministry to define its outcome units in writing, and eventually having someone independent count a sample of what was delivered. Until then the badge stays where it is.

Multiply never receives your gift. Every button sends you to the ministry’s own donation page, so 100% of what you give goes where you sent it and we take no cut.

We take nothing from the ministries listed and they do not pay to be here. No ministry has reviewed its own page. Listing is not endorsement: 94 causes are here, and several are listed precisely because their numbers are missing.

If you are a ministry and a figure here is wrong or out of date, send the document to aakash@inspectmind.ai. A correction that comes with a source gets published, and so is the fact that it was corrected.

• 94 causes, all researched from public web pages and PDFs. Nobody has been interviewed and no site has been visited.
• The directory is weighted toward large ministries that publish annual reports. Small indigenous ministries — often the ones with the lowest costs — are the hardest to verify and are underrepresented here.
• The cost base comes from national averages. A ministry working in one poor province of a middle-income country faces costs its national figure does not show.
• Nothing on this site is tax advice. Deductibility depends on giving to a qualifying organisation, and giving internationally has its own rules.

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