Last month, Christianity Today magazine achieved 21 awards from the Evangelical Press Association including first place for a freelance article, first place for a medium-length article, and an Award of Excellence. They also won first place for Cause of the Year: Extreme Poverty with the article Cost-Effective Compassion by Bruce Wydick, which lays out how well common poverty interventions—like giving microfinance loans, sponsoring children, and providing mosquito nets—really work, and which ones have the biggest bang for your buck.

To get an accurate picture, Wydick polled top development economists who specialize in analyzing development programs, asking them to rate, in terms of impact and cost-effectiveness per donated dollar, some of the most common poverty interventions to which ordinary people donate their money. Sixteen researchers responded to the survey, including people from Cornell, Duke, Yale, the University of Maryland, UC-Berkeley, Stanford, George Washington, UC-Santa Cruz, the University of Minnesota, Brandeis, Michigan State, Tufts, and the World Bank. Of the respondents, five are members of the Association of Christian Economists.

Mark Galli, editor of Christianity Today, explains how the article came about and why he thinks the article is so helpful.

Where did the idea for the article come from?

I was researching a story on whether, in fact, global hunger and poverty could be "solved," as a few economists and activists were claiming at the time. So I started interviewing economists, especially looking for Christian economists, to see if they thought this was a realistic hope. Most thought that technically, this might be possible, but given human nature, politics, and other factors, it wasn't likely. Along the way, Bruce Wydick suggested that he'd been doing research into which poverty interventions actually work. That interested me, and I told him to write it up.

Why is it important to investigate the true effectiveness of common poverty interventions?

Well, we all are regularly asked to give money to this cause and that as a way to address one aspect of poverty or another. Naturally, each organization claims it makes a big difference. But I thought it would be good to have an objective look at what works and what doesn't.

What kind of feedback have you received from readers?

Most people are very appreciative. Some of the organizations were a little defensive, naturally. But we tried to clarify that Bruce was only talking about interventions whose results could be measured by developmental economists. That's all. There are lots of interventions whose results cannot be measured—praying with someone, forming a Bible study, doing more wide-ranging community work—that surely make a difference, but simply can't be quantified. That's doesn't mean they are unimportant. For this article, we just were looking at things that could more easily be quantified. The world of serving the poor is, of course, much bigger than that, but measurable results in some areas are still a part of the picture.

Read the award-winning article and see how Wydick and the 16 respondents rated 10 common poverty interventions.

See the story behind the story of other award-winning content from the 2013 Evangelical Press Association convention.