The GiveWell Blog

Research Strategy: Cross-Cutting

| by Alex Cohen

GiveWell’s cross-cutting team works to improve GiveWell’s grantmaking by tackling complex research questions that cut across grantmaking areas, reviewing our research and grants, and ensuring transparency and legibility in our findings. This post explains more about our role, how we think the work we do helps GiveWell’s grantmaking, and our current areas of focus.

What does the cross-cutting team do?

The GiveWell research team’s goal is to find and fund the most cost-effective giving opportunities in global health and development. While our grantmaking teams are focused on funding programs in their specific areas (malaria, vaccines, nutrition, water, livelihoods, and new areas), the cross-cutting team addresses research questions that span across different areas of our work.

We do this in a few ways:

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Staff Members’ Personal Donations for Giving Season 2024

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

For this post, a number of GiveWell staff members volunteered to share the thinking behind their personal donations for the year. We’ve published similar posts in previous years. Staff are listed alphabetically by first name.

You can click the links to jump to a staff member’s entry: Araceli Steger, Calum Richards, Chandler Brotak, Dilhan Perera, Elie Hassenfeld, Erin Crossett, Julie Faller, Lauren Imholte, Maggie Lloydhauser, Natalie Crispin, Paige Henchen, Sarah Eustis-Guthrie, Steph Stojanovic, Teryn Mattox.

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November 2024 Updates

| by Chandler Brotak

Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!

If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here.

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December 2024 Open Thread

| by GiveWell Staff

Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.

You can view previous open threads here.

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GiveWell’s 2024 Giving Recommendations

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

Our three Giving Funds—all of which focus on maximizing the impact of your gift—were designed for donors with different preferences, and we encourage you to donate to the one that makes the most sense for you:

  • If you trust GiveWell to decide where and when to allocate your donation, we recommend you donate to our Unrestricted Fund, which can be spent on any GiveWell priority, including both grantmaking and our own operating expenses. We often use unrestricted funding for our operating expenses, but when we have more than we need, we allocate the rest to grantmaking.
  • If you trust GiveWell’s research and want to limit your donation to grantmaking, we recommend you donate to the All Grants Fund, which makes rolling grants to the highest-impact opportunities we can identify in global health and well-being, including some with high expected value that carry a higher risk of not achieving their potential impact.
  • If you want your donation to be allocated quickly to the programs we’re most confident about, we recommend you donate to the Top Charities Fund. We expect to commit donations to this fund, which are used for the highest-priority funding needs at our four Top Charities, in the quarter after they are received.

We think donors can do a huge amount of good by supporting these funds. The rest of this post describes some of the work that donations to these funds have enabled over the past year.

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