The Importance, tractability, and neglectedness approach is the go-to hereustic for EA's.

The open philanthropy project approaches it like this:

“What is the problem?” = importance

“What are possible interventions?” = tractability

“Who else is working on it?” = neglectedness

I reckon it's a simplification of the rational planning model:

Intelligence gathering — A comprehensive organization of data, potential problems and opportunities are identified, collected and analyzed.

Identifying problems — Accounting relevant factors.

Assessing the consequences of all options — Listing possible consequences and alternatives that could resolve the problem and ranking the probability that each potential factors could materialize in-order to give a correct priority in the analysis.

Relating consequences to values — With all policies there will be a set of relevant dimensional values (for example, economic feasibility and environmental protection) and a set of criteria for appropriateness, against which performance (or consequences) of each option being responsive can be judged.

Choosing the preferred option — The policy is brought through from fully understanding the problems, opportunities, all the consequences & the criteria of the tentative options and by selecting a optimal alternative with consensus of involved actors.

What do you reckon?