We study the effect of a randomized one-on-one remote phone tutoring program implemented between 2021 and 2023. The intervention reached almost seven thousand students in seven Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay and Peru. The program targeted students with low initial learning levels and focused on foundational numeracy skills using a differentiated instruction approach. We find that assignment to tutoring increased student test scores by 0.2 SD. Tutoring benefited all students, with no differential effects by gender, age, socioeconomic status, or baseline scores. Students who initially reported having difficulty with concentration or memory experienced larger average effects. Finally, we find that students with lower initial performance exhibited larger improvements in more basic mathematical operations, whereas those with  better performance at baseline saw larger gains in more complex operations. This underscores the importance of offering differentiated instruction based on students' initial performance.

While insights into optimal fundraising strategies inform the debate on whether fundraising is valuable to non-profits seeking to maximize their charitable income, they do not speak to questions related to production efficiency or the optimal size and shape of the sector. Answering these questions requires a broader perspective. We argue that such a broader perspective must take into account the implications of inter-charity competition and donor responses for (i) the distribution of donations across charitable causes, across time and in aggregate; (ii) the technological choices charities make when deciding on how to convert donations and other inputs in the production of charitable outputs; and (iii) the structure of charitable markets. Using the insights from (i)–(iii), we then discuss the scope of government policies and tax incentives.