I started work at GiveWell six months ago, just a few weeks after graduating from college. I had been following GiveWell pretty intensely for more than a year, since I had gotten back from my own trip to India. During that time, I had become a little obsessed: I had read the entire history of the blog and got really excited each time GiveWell finally posted the audio from the most recent board meeting.

Even as a serious GiveWell fan, though, there were a number of things that I didn’t know about the organization that I should have. These aren’t secrets or titillating stories about office politics, just some things that I’ve learned that I didn’t know before.

The biggest challenge remains “find outstanding giving opportunities” - not “get more eyeballs.” I wasn’t totally ignorant about the difficulty of finding outstanding giving opportunities, but I thought that GiveWell was clearly doing so better than anyone else working publicly, and that accordingly it should focus more on outreach, rather than improving research. As an outsider, I didn’t have a good sense of how much went into the recommendations or all the work that goes into charities that don’t end up receiving recommendations. I didn’t think it was easy, but it seemed like Holden and Elie pretty much had it under control, and that there was lots of low-hanging fruit on the outreach side.

As far as I can tell now, neither of those things are really true.

On the outreach front, GiveWell had already tried or looked into many different strategies, even if they hadn’t blogged about it. And because our users generally aren’t typical donors, a lot of the things that charities normally do to cultivate donors might be actively harmful for us. (But we definitely haven’t thought of everything, so please do let us know or comment if you have ideas for how we could “sell” our research better.)

On the research front, although it isn’t very hard to come up with better recommendations than other charity evaluators, we face two problems I hadn’t fully considered:

• Room for more funding. Because a number of large funders are scooping up excellent funding opportunities in global health, many good chances to help people are already taken. We need to find charities that are good bets, but not so obviously good that they have all the funding they can productively use.
• Our competition isn’t other charity rating organizations. This is about the baseline that GiveWell’s recommendations are compared to, rather than the competition for funding opportunities. For a long time, it has seemed natural for people to compare GiveWell to Charity Navigator or Philanthropedia, but as we continue to grow, I think that comparison becomes less and less salient.

  As we raise our ambitions with projects like GiveWell Labs, we will be “competing” not with other charity evaluators but with foundations. Because some foundations are extremely strategic, well-resourced, and focused on the same goal of doing as much good as possible, finding better giving opportunities than they do is a much higher burden.

Both of these problems become harder as GiveWell grows, because we’ll need to create more “room for money moved” and will more naturally be compared to foundations rather than other charity evaluators.

Our standards for what we expect from charities are a moving target. This is true in two senses:

• Our standards for giving opportunities and evidence are generally higher than they used to be. Although we thought in December 2011 that our top charities in 2011 might not be as good an opportunity as VillageReach was in December 2010, they had both been through a much more thorough wringer than VillageReach had been when we first recommended it. On the evidence side, just compare our intervention reports for immunizations (VillageReach), bednets (AMF), and deworming (SCI). The latter two are much more thorough.
• We’re willing to accept less evidence from a specific charity if we have more confidence in an intervention. This dynamic played an important role in our decision between our top two charities. SCI had significant evidence that it had historically actually decreased the prevalence of worm infections, while AMF had very limited evidence that people actually used the bednets that they distributed. The overall evidence that people do generally use bednets that they’re given was stronger, however, than the evidence that deworming has developmental effects, which was crucial to the case for SCI. Even though SCI had more evidence that its own activities were successful, we thought that the evidence for AMF’s intervention made it a better choice.

The majority of the useful evidence we rely on to produce our ratings does not come from charities themselves. The VillageReach review, which focused on evidence from VillageReach’s pilot project, and Holden’s exchange with Giving What We Can, in which he argued for focusing on charities more than interventions, had made me think that GiveWell’s research focused overwhelmingly on charities rather than interventions. That impression was incorrect. I personally have spent far more of my time at GiveWell working on intervention-level research than research on individual charities, and while I’m not sure of the overall breakdown across GiveWell, it’s definitely not a blowout for charity-level research. Part of the reason for that is that high-quality evidence actually exists for many interventions; generally, that’s not the case for charities, even outstanding ones. This isn’t really much a criticism of charities, since it wouldn’t be a good allocation of resources for, e.g., every deworming charity to be doing research about the developmental effects of its own specific deworming projects.

GiveWell is really skeptical of academic research, even though we use it all the time. I’m still not sure if this level of skepticism is appropriate, but it seems to be a rational response to all the potential issues with publication bias. My impression is that the typical response to findings like “most published research findings are false” is to bemoan the structural issues and then ignore them when interpreting any particular study. GiveWell doesn’t do that.

I knew before I started that GiveWell really liked randomized control trials, but I thought that preference was due to econometric naivete rather than a principled preference. Now I know that one of the reasons why GiveWell prefers RCTs is that they make it harder for researchers to fudge results, intentionally or unintentionally, and thus hopefully make publication bias less of a problem.

Our research focuses more on global health than economic development. This realization struck me in October as I found myself reading articles on schistosomiasis from parasitology journals published in the 1970s, though it was obvious in hindsight given the charities GiveWell had recommended. I think the discussions of randomized control trials and the general trappings of cost-effectiveness analysis make it easy to think of our work as economic, and we do share many of the sensibilities and interests of the “randomista” movement in development economics, but in subject matter most of our research is focused on health.

In addition to navel-gazing about GiveWell, I’ve gotten to do some pretty neat stuff while I’ve been here: I went to Malawi, found some big errors in a WHO cost-effectiveness calculation for deworming, and had some really interesting conversations about how to do the most good. So, just in case you’re interested, we’re still hiring.

We’ve been working on an update of our disaster relief report, and came across an American Red Cross evaluation from December 2010 stating:

If you would like to access this report, please get in contact with the ALNAP secretariat.

We emailed the ALNAP secretariat, saying:

I am writing from GiveWell, an independent, non-profit charity evaluator to request access to the ALNAP report “American Red Cross – Haiti” that is listed on the ALNAP website at http://www.alnap.org/node/7131.aspx. Would it be possible to send us a copy of the report?

The secretariat responded that the evaluation cannot be shared externally due to an in-house policy.

Why should this report be confidential over a year after its publication?

(Thanks to Eliza Scheffler for finding this.)

Update: the page linked to in this post regarding the evaluation appears to have been removed (very recently - I am writing this at 11:02am and it was up as of 10:30am). Here is Google’s cache of the site and here is a copy of the Google cache stored on our server (for when the Google cache expires).

We previously listed our five chief criteria for GiveWell Labs (a new arm of our research process that will be open to any giving opportunity, no matter what form and what sector). This post further discusses the first two of these criteria - “upside” and “high likelihood of success” - and the tradeoff between them.

Upside

We use “upside” to refer to the possibility that a philanthropic project will have a huge/outsized impact. While it’s a good thing to fund projects that have this kind of potential - and while a single hugely successful project can make up for many failures - we also see danger in overthinking the upside of projects.

We don’t have experience with venture capital, but our impression is that in the for-profit world it’s extremely difficult to read the “upside” of different ventures, and thus many investments with “big win” potential are needed for one big win. Not only will many of the most hyped, funded, seemingly limitless-potential companies flop, but many of the biggest success stories won’t necessary look high-potential early on. For example, Twitter began as a frivolous-looking side project of another startup; Facebook’s founder was presenting a relatively unambitious-sounding vision of a college-only network a year after its founding. Another striking example of the danger of overthinking upside is provided by a published debate over AirBNB: Union Square Ventures saw a talented team and successful product, but declined to invest specifically because “I’m just not sure how big it’s going to be.” AirBNB later appears to have become a billion-dollar company.

Our feeling is that this sort of uncertainty extends to philanthropy as well. It’s hard to say in advance how generalizable and widely applicable an innovation is and how big the “latent market” for it is, and it’s also hard to say how an early-stage project will look in a few years. Because of this, we are against putting heavy weight on quantification of potential impact, and in favor of looking for projects with real-world feedback loops, so that they can learn and adapt as they go, hopefully eventually hitting on an approach that works and can be scaled and/or generalized.

Upside vs. likelihood of success

We do feel that there are probably some signs that distinguish high-upside-potential from low-upside-potential projects. The main one that strikes us is the extent to which a project’s goals revolve around development and testing of new knowledge, ideas and approaches, as opposed to repeating what has been done before or relying heavily on particular individual talents.

To the extent that that’s right, there is an inherent tension between upside and likelihood of success. To maximize the former, one looks for things that haven’t been done before; to maximize the latter, one largely looks for things that have worked before. For most of GiveWell’s history, we’ve focused on finding interventions and organizations with reasonably strong track records (though we’ve taken risks and considered upside as well); GiveWell Labs may give us more leeway for even higher-risk, higher-upside projects.

Our basic approach to the tradeoff:

• We consider likelihood of success much easier to evaluate than upside, and we’d prefer a project with only the former going for it to a project with only the latter going for it. However, we could recommend a project with no track record, high upside and strong performance on our other criteria (strong people, room for more funding, and plans for getting real-world feedback and learning from our results rather than a binary “success/failure” outcome).
• There may be “best of both worlds” opportunities in the “valley of death.” That is, it may be possible to find cases where there is a new approach whose basic promise has been demonstrated at a small scale, but which still needs more demonstration before it can reach very large scale. It isn’t clear to us whether funders often overlook these opportunities, but if they do, this could result in outstanding opportunities for us and our donors.

We spent a lot of time last month dealing with headaches around tax deductions and processing fees. We thought we’d share our experiences with these headaches, and how they get in the way of donors’ abilities to give as effectively as possible. We’re thinking about how to better deal with these issues in 2012.

Tax deductibility shifts the focus from “having impact” to “navigating bureaucracy”

Many governments, including the U.S., provide very large benefits for people who support government-recognized charities. These benefits can be the equivalent of a 1:2 or so donation match. The goal here is admirable: encourage generosity and increase the flow of funds to charity.

The problem is that every country has its own (generally onerous, expensive and long) process for becoming a recognized charity. Last month we dealt with the following issues:

• The Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI), our #2 charity, is a registered charity in the U.K., but not in the U.S. We’re confident that it would meet the U.S. criteria for a charity - its activities consist of treating people in low-income countries for parasitic infections - but because it hasn’t gone through the process of registering a U.S. affiliate (which can take months), U.S. donors can’t get tax deductions for supporting it. We don’t want U.S. donors to have an incentive to support other charities when this is one of the best we’ve found, so we’ve worked to find a way …
  • We worked with Imperial College Foundation to set up a Google Checkout account, so that the Imperial College Foundation could take donations for the support of SCI.
  • This meant working with contacts we hadn’t worked with before, and it took some time; in the meantime, we took donations ourselves for the support of SCI (i.e., offering donors the option of giving directly to GiveWell, which is U.S.-registered, and earmarking their donations for the support of SCI).
  • Imperial College Foundation then had its Google Checkout account suspended - we still don’t know why, though we believe it has to do with an administrative technicality - returning us to a state where the only option for U.S. tax deductibility is to give directly to GiveWell for the support of SCI.
• The Against Malaria Foundation, our #1 charity, has taken the unusual step of obtaining charitable status in more than 10 countries. This likely took a good deal of effort, but has been very helpful in removing any disincentive for donors around the world to support it. It was great to see a European institution donate over $50,000 (we believe this is the same institution that expressed interest in giving the same amount to VillageReach last year, but ultimately didn’t go through with it because it couldn’t get a tax deduction in its own country). But even here there have been problems:
  • We were recently alerted that even though AMF is registered as a charity in Australia, it is not tax-deductible for donors in Australia. We’ve never considered the possibility that a country might have separate processes for these two things (the U.S. doesn’t); this took us by surprise and resulted in our having to email all those who had donated to AMF from Australia in the past to let them know about the error. There have been some refunds as a result.
  • A Swedish donor expressed interest in giving a large amount to AMF, but Sweden is not among the many countries where AMF is registered. The gift did ultimately go through, though we don’t know whether the donor got the tax deduction. There’s something a bit absurd to us about an organization like AMF - which clearly has a charitable purpose and has gone through proving this to over 10 different countries - still facing this problem.
• We’ve also dealt with multiple donors who wish to give stock rather than cash. This sort of gift can have major tax advantages, but it also involves a much more complex process both for the donor and for the charity. Since we have experience with taking stock donations and our top charities don’t, we’ve been facilitating these transactions through our own donor-advised fund.

One might defend these regulations, saying something along the lines of: “Sure, these laws make things more complicated, but they give people incentives to give more to charity - that’s a good thing.” This is partly true, but it isn’t quite that simple either. While SCI - one of the best organizations we’ve found for a donor looking to help the poor - is not a U.S. recognized charity, the U.S. Golf Association is. So is the National Cattle Men’s Beef Association (whose mission statement lists “increase consumer demand for beef” as its first point).

Much of charitable giving supports political advocacy (so the government is effectively subsidizing people to try to influence it), or local places of worship, or to foundations that give away money extremely slowly, or to alma maters whose balance sheets don’t seem to be crying out for government subsidies. A 2007 study estimates that only 30% of giving is even attempting to help the poor, and we don’t know how much of that 30% is effectively helping the poor; we believe the bulk is focused on the donor’s experiences, not on the recipient’s.

In addition, the incentives created by this system can be complex and strange. For example, Elie is married and I’m not, so his standard tax deduction (the tax deduction he gets if he chooses not to itemize charitable and other deductions) is much higher than mine. That means it looks like I will be getting a tax benefit for 2011 and Elie won’t. (If he owned his residence rather than rented it, he likely would get the tax benefit.)

We see a lot of room for improvement in the way the charitable tax deduction works. In particular, we’d like to see it become easier (and quicker) for charities delivering proven health interventions to poor countries to get the same tax status accorded the U.S. Golf Association.

There is no easy, reasonably priced way to give large donations online

We want people to be able to give to charity quickly and easily. So far, the only way we’ve found to facilitate this involves credit cards - and credit cards involve processing fees. We haven’t been able to find a standard processor with lower fees than PayPal’s, which exceed 2%.

2% may not sound like much, and on a $100 donation, it isn’t. But when someone gives $10,000 that means over $200 is spent on processing. We simply don’t see a good reason for this to be the case. It becomes better for such donors to give by writing a check, even though this is more time-consuming for both the donor and the processor, and much harder for GiveWell to track (in order to evaluate our own influence).

Fortunately, Google offers fee-free processing through 3/31/12 to nonprofits that are enrolled in its Google Grants program and using Google Checkout. Unfortunately, trying to take advantage of this raises all the same issues discussed in the previous section: now, instead of just advantages for charities that have gone through various governments’ registration processes, there are also advantages for charities that have gone through Google’s registration process (which can also take a significant amount of time).

Neither of our current two top charities have set up free donation processing with Google. We are, so we’ve been taking donations for the support of our top charities for those who wish to avoid fees.

Ultimately, we believe the better long-term fix will come from services like Dwolla, which deals with directly linked bank accounts (rather than credit) and processes transactions for $0.25 (or less) each, regardless of size. But we don’t believe that most of the donors using GiveWell’s research are signed up for these services (and signing up for them involves multiple verifications, including a bank verification that can take days). We aren’t sure yet how we’re going to handle the next couple of years, after Google stops covering fees and before a better payment system has entered widespread use.

Another major issue is that people making large donations very frequently run into problems with their credit card companies (due to the fact that they are spending so much more on a single item than they usually do). In our experience, about half of donations over $5,000 are declined the first time a donor tries to make the gift and are only cleared after he or she speaks with his card company. This can be particularly stressful for people trying to make last-minute gifts. Services like Dwolla may avoid this issue as well, due to the direct bank account link (we aren’t sure).

Possible fixes
For 2012, we’re considering:

• Continuing our shift from asking donors to give directly to charities to asking them to give to GiveWell for the support of those charities. We currently have giving to GiveWell as the primary option for SCI (since we’re a U.S. charity and SCI isn’t) and as a secondary option for AMF (for those seeking to avoid processing fees). We may shift toward having this be the primary option for all charities. This could greatly simplify all of the other fixes we’re working on, since whatever solutions we come up with will be easy to implement for all recommended charities. It would also simplify our own data collection and reporting. We will always provide an option for donors to support our recommended charities directly, but this option may become de-emphasized.
• Encouraging past donors to consider changing how they give. We may encourage people giving very large amounts ($5,000+) to use donor-advised funds and give appreciated stock, to realize full tax advantages and avoid fees. This will be a lot more hassle for them and for us, but the financial advantages may be worth it. We may also encourage people to make their annual gifts earlier in the year, to avoid the stress that can come with complications in trying to make gifts just in time for the tax year.
• Working with non-traditional payment processors with lower fees.
• Obtaining charitable status for ourselves in other countries so that donors giving to GiveWell for the support of recommended charities can obtain tax deductions.

Good giving is difficult enough already

We started GiveWell because we know there are people out there who want to give for maximal impact, but have minimal time to spare. We’ve worked hard to create a resource allowing these people to support outstanding charities as quickly and easily as possible. Unfortunately, the complexities of tax deductions and processing fees are working against this mission.

We’re doing what we can to deal with these issues as well. More broadly, we expect that the issue with processing fees will eventually see a good resolution, since cheaper processing methods are available and fighting for market share. We’re less optimistic about the tax code, which may only get more complicated - and more distortive when it comes to picking a charity - over time.

2011 saw strong growth for GiveWell’s web traffic and “money moved” (dollars given based on our recommendations). This is our final quarterly report for the year, and most meaningful since it includes December (when we see the vast majority of our “money moved”).

The numbers in this post are preliminary. We continue to learn about additional donations due to our research and will post an updated report when we publish our annual review in the coming weeks.

Money moved

By “money moved” we mean donations that we can confidently identify as being made on the strength of our recommendations. The following chart shows growth in overall money moved and compares this to GiveWell’s operating expenses. Overall money moved includes all donations driven by GiveWell, including $750,000 committed by Good Ventures to our top two charities and $1 million committed to GiveWell Labs (the latter funding has not yet been allocated to specific organizations). Note that we count “money moved” when it is committed, rather than when it is disbursed.

The table below show dollars donated and number of donations in 2008-2011 through our website. While money moved through the website is only a fraction of overall money moved, we believe this is a meaningful metric for tracking our progress/growth; total money moved, which includes mostly larger gifts that are “lumpier” and more unpredictable, is a better metric of our overall influence.

Overall, growth in 2011 was strong.

Year	Money moved through website	Annual growth in money moved through website	Number of donations	Annual growth in number of donations
2008	$35,021	-	130	-
2009	$143,013	308%	665	412%
2010	$399,456	179%	976	47%
2011	$1,305,089	227%	3,099	218%

Below we break down money moved by charity. A few notes on this table:

• The majority of the donations have gone to our #1 and #2 charities, Against Malaria Foundation and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative.
• VillageReach, which was our #1 charity until November 2011 (when we decided to replace it due to limited room for more funding), also received significant funding in the first 11 months of the year.
• The next 6 charities in the table are our standout organizations.
• We have recommended Doctors Without Borders for its work in disaster situations, such as the famine in Somalia, and we have recommended Nurse-Family Partnership for its work in the U.S.
• “Other organizations” includes donations to 9 organizations we have recommended in the past, such as PSI, Village Enterprise Foundation, Stop TB Partnership, and Invest in Kids.
• The “allocation not yet decided/known” includes about $34,000 in donations to GiveWell designated for regranting to recommended charities, and about $45,000 in donations through Network for Good, a donation processor (we have not yet received information from Network for Good on which organizations received this funding).

Charity	Total money moved
Against Malaria Foundation	$2,160,787
Schistosomiasis Control Initiative	$658,091
VillageReach	$608,444
Nyaya Health	$110,759
GiveDirectly	$86,146
Small Enterprise Foundation	$78,170
KIPP/KIPP Houston	$58,504
Pratham	$45,813
Innovations for Poverty Action	$36,969
Doctors Without Borders (MSF)	$27,392
Nurse-Family Partnership	$17,280
Other organizations	$29,509
Allocation not yet decided/known	$83,464
Committed to GiveWell Labs	$1,000,000
Total	$5,001,328

Web traffic

The chart below show our web traffic over time, as measured by unique visitors each month. There are seasonal spikes each December when interest in charitable giving peaks (circled in the chart below). We label other spikes.

Of the money moved to our top charities through our website in 2010, 25% was on December 31st alone. We know that lots of people will be looking to make last-minute donations.

If you only have five minutes but you want to take advantage of the thousands of hours of work we put into finding the best giving opportunities, consider giving to our top charities. They have strong track records, accomplish a lot of good per dollar spent, and have good concrete plans for how to use additional donations.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

• After you give, spread the word. This is the perfect time to remind people (via Facebook sharing, tweeting, etc.) to give before the year ends. And people making last-minute gifts are likely to be receptive to suggestions.
• If you have any questions, we’re here to help. We should be available by phone for most of the day, and responding to email when we’re not. (See our contact page). Our research FAQ may also be a good resource.

We haven’t written much about mega-charities: extremely large international charities (budgets of $250+ million per year) carrying out a very wide range of activities, and commonly recognized as household names. We’re thinking of groups like UNICEF, Oxfam, Mercy Corps, Catholic Relief Services, Save the Children, World Vision, and CARE.

The main reason we haven’t written much about these groups is that we still know very little about them. They tend to publish a great deal of web content aimed at fundraising, but very little of interest for impact-oriented donors. On the occasions when we’ve engaged with these groups, we’ve come away with the feeling that they engage in a wide variety of activities, and we can’t get a concrete sense of (a) the specifics of the activities; (b) the organization-wide track record; (c) likely uses of additional funding. (We wrote in 2007 about our inability to put together bird’s-eye views of their activities).

Below are general impressions from our limited information on, and interactions with, these groups. Note that in preparing this post, we examined the websites of the 7 organizations named in the first paragraph, looking for whatever information we could find on specific projects (as opposed to broad characterizations of activities), results (technical writeups, not narratives), and financial information (any budget breakdown by project or program type, or revenue source - we tabulated our findings in this spreadsheet).

• Mega-charities tend to provide only very broad-brush information on their activities, and next to no information on their results. Budget breakdowns are extremely broad (see our spreadsheet). Even the “papers” or “publications” sections of these websites tend to focus on papers giving general advice, rather than on details of past executed programs. (Examples: UNICEF, World Vision.) We have seen evaluation databases from Oxfam and CARE, and wrote about our impressions on the latter (similar to our impressions on the former) in 2009.

  CARE is, as far as we can tell, the only one of these organizations that publishes descriptions of its many specific projects, though these descriptions are still relatively broad and do not include budgets.

• Mega-charities tend to have extremely diverse activities, with relatively small amounts spent on health and large amounts spent on disaster relief (see our spreadsheet). We’ve reviewed what we can of these groups’ disaster relief work, and in general we view it unfavorably from a transparency/accountability standpoint. The relatively low amount of resources going to health is a negative for us, due to our view that this is the most promising area for individual donors. UNICEF appears to be more health-focused than the others discussed here.
• Mega-charities tend to get large amounts of money from governments, particularly the U.S. government. While the “percentage of support coming from the U.S. government” is not always clear and depends on how one counts cash vs. in-kind contributions, government support seems to generally be at least 20% and sometimes closer to 70% of total revenues. An exception is Oxfam; we couldn’t find a specific statement of revenue sources to address this, but in a recent conversation Oxfam representatives stated to us that Oxfam takes very limited funding from governments and no funding from the U.S. government.
• Mega-charities appear to us to often act as “contractors” for governments and other mega-donors. Scanning CARE’s projects provides some illustration of this idea, which is largely based on informal conversations we’ve had about these organizations (as well as the significance of government funding to these organizations). While these organizations often have substantial unrestricted funding as well, it isn’t clear to us whether this funding is used to supplement big-funder contracts or to run projects at mega-charities’ discretion. One thing we generally don’t see when examining these mega-charities is any indication of an overarching strategic plan, another sign that they may see themselves as essentially contractors (Oxfam is again an exception.)

Overall, our impression is that your donation to these organizations is very hard to trace, but will likely supplement an agenda of extremely diverse programming, driven largely by governments and other very large funders. We feel that when donating to these groups, you’re unlikely to get the sort of impact-per-dollar that you can with our top charities, which focus on some of the most proven and cost-effective interventions.

One organization we haven’t mentioned in this post is Doctors Without Borders. We perceive this group as more strategic, more transparent/accountable, more focused on health, and more promising overall than the organizations discussed here, and we intend to investigate it further in the coming year. We will also likely be investigating Oxfam, which we perceive as being the most independent and strategic of the organizations listed above, largely due to its lack of reliance on government funding.

Elie recently highlighted his doubts about our top charities, and a commenter responded:

Of course one ultimately never knows how much good a charity or any given donation will do. Bednets might end up saving the life of child who grows up to be the next Nelson Mandela – or the next Saddam Hussein. Everything we do is a gamble, but I’d like to make the best ones I can. These two charities look like good gambles.

I agree completely, but I’m still glad Elie emphasized these risks. Because in one specific way, supporting our top charities is riskier than supporting any other charity: if something goes wrong with one of our top charities, it will come out promptly and publicly.

All charities involve substantial risks, in terms of substantial possibilities that their activities won’t go as well as hoped. If there’s one thing that we’ve learned in over four years of researching charities, it’s that helping people isn’t easy, and there’s no such thing as a guarantee in aid. But with most charities, you’ll never have to face the embarrassment or cognitive dissonance that comes with acknowledging failure - simply because you’ll probably never really find out what happens to the money you give.

In picking top charities, GiveWell puts substantial weight on accountability: we want to be sure that we will find out what happens, particularly if things go poorly. We’ve been publishing regular updates on VillageReach, the first charity we directed significant funding to, and there have been some substantial bumps in the road that VillageReach (and GiveWell) has disclosed. We plan to do the same with our current two top charities.

Taking good risks

Donors should also know that while we like to see strong evidence bases and track records, we don’t try to find the “safest bets” in giving - we try to find the “best bets.” Achieving maximal cost-effectiveness often means being relatively ambitious in terms of how far each dollar stretches. In addition, we believe that “upside” (the chance of doing a lot of good) usually means taking some risk.

For example, giving to GiveWell (directly) in 2007 was far more risky than giving to GiveWell in 2011. GiveWell in 2011 has more credibility and more evidence of impact. Yet a dollar of support for GiveWell in 2007 was far more helpful to us than a dollar of support today, for exactly the same reasons. Because there were only a small number of people who would go out on a limb for us, these people ended up being crucial for our startup and development.

Because we see a direct trade-off between donating early in an organization’s development (more risk, more upside) and late (less risk, less upside), we generally look for organizations that have good track records for their age. VillageReach, with just a single successful pilot project, has a substantial chance of failing to translate its model on a large scale - but huge potential for good if it succeeds. SCI, by contrast, has a well-established model with results from multiple countries, so donations to it are less likely to have either zero impact or outsized impact. AMF sits somewhere in the middle. All three charities are well past the startup stage, which we think poses too many due diligence challenges to be a good fit for our audience.

The advantages of risking failure

If you believe that GiveWell is committed to regular, fully honest reports on our top charities - with no sugar-coating of failures - this may be the best reason to have confidence in our research. It means our incentives are better-aligned than those of any other funder: if we overlook a problem we should have seen, we’ll be facing up to this publicly.

When I give to our top charities, I know there’s a chance I’ll find out a few years from now that they got disappointing results. For me, though, this fact makes my giving much more exciting and much more “real” feeling. Finally, I feel that giving - like other purchases and actions that are meaningful to me - has visible impact and provides learning experiences. I feel the anxiety that can only come with trying to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. I hope our donors feel the same way.

Cari Tuna is a member of GiveWell’s board of directors and president of Good Ventures, a foundation in the San Francisco Bay Area which she created with her partner Dustin Moskovitz earlier this year. Previously, Cari was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Today, I’m writing to share that Good Ventures is donating $500,000 to the Against Malaria Foundation and $250,000 to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative–GiveWell’s #1 and #2 charity recommendations this giving season, respectively. Over the coming months, Good Ventures also plans to donate to the six nonprofits that GiveWell recently named “standout organizations”: GiveDirectly, Innovations for Poverty Action, KIPP Houston, Nyaya Health, Pratham and the Small Enterprise Foundation.

I first learned about GiveWell about a year ago while preparing to transition from reporting to working in philanthropy full time. I read about the organization in Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save and, around the same time, met co-founder Holden Karnofsky through a mutual friend. Right away, I was struck by the rigor of GiveWell’s research, its commitment to transparency and the volume of thoughtful commentary about the nonprofit sector it already had produced in just three years.

In April 2011, I joined GiveWell’s board. Since then, I’ve been increasingly impressed by the co-founders’ dedication to their work, humility about what they know and what they don’t, and ability to adapt the GiveWell model as they learn.

As a new foundation, Good Ventures’ top priorities are 1) to learn how to do as much good as possible with the resources at our disposal and 2) to become a great resource for other people who care about improving our world. We plan to make a number of carefully selected grants over the coming years in order to learn about promising solutions to the world’s most formidable problems. Over time, we hope our work contributes to significant, sustained reductions in poverty and improvements in quality of life for disadvantaged people around the world.

To that end, we see huge potential in encouraging greater effectiveness and transparency across the social sector, in particular by helping to foster a culture in which individual donors demand evidence of impact from the nonprofits they support.

One simple idea–that all donors should be at least as thoughtful about our philanthropic investments as we are about our financial investments–has transformed the way I think about giving. If you’re reading GiveWell’s blog, this probably isn’t news to you. But it might be news to your friends, parents, siblings, children or coworkers. So this giving season, please spread the word, and let’s transform the culture around giving, one heart and mind at a time.

Note: While Good Ventures does not accept unsolicited requests for funding, we do consider all of GiveWell’s recommended charities–and not just its #1 recommendation–for substantial grants.

There’s no question that “giving a goat” has caught on, as a way of getting people to support charity - rather than consumer goods - for the holidays.

I certainly don’t need an iPad or a new TV, and I encourage friends and family to make donations in my name rather than sending me gifts. However, I’d rather not get a “goat” because:

• I’d have unanswered questions about the effects this gift might have. Will the person who receives the goat be well-suited to receive it? Will they mistreat the goat? Will the goat produce enough to justify their investment in it? Will the local community perceive unfairness in who is chosen to receive the goat?

  We’ve found livestock-gift programs to be among the more poorly documented developing-world aid programs out there. We have little sense of whether and when these concerns apply.

• The model of giving out goats fundamentally doesn’t make much sense to me. We wrote in 2009 that giving out livestock seems to have the same challenges as giving out cash, plus additional challenges. This isn’t to say that it’s never a good idea. But supporting a model with such fundamental questions would make me uneasy unless I saw those questions being addressed in an intelligent, context-specific way. (Note that there is a charity giving out cash.)
• It’s not really a goat anyway. See our 2009 discussion of donor illusions: chances are, the fine print says you’re really just giving a donation to the charity, not any specific goat. Matching your dollars with a specific goat doesn’t (in our view) really make sense logistically, so we’re glad that it isn’t actually happening.
• I think there are much better ways to help people with donations. This is the most important point for me. Maybe “giving a goat” really does help people - but I don’t believe it helps them as much as possible given our other options. GiveWell’s top charities carry out proven, cost-effective interventions; they have strong track records; they have better transparency and accountability than any livestock-focused programs I know of. They can generate incredible value for your money, such as saving a life for $2000 or keeping someone worm-free throughout childhood for $5. Those are our best evidence-based estimates (the details are all online), not marketing pitches.
• Giving a goat means supporting the best story for donors, not the best solution for the people I want to help. If you agree that there are better ways to help people than “give a goat,” you should be worried about the message you send when you opt for the latter. To me, the whole point of “giving to charity for the holidays” is to take the focus off of our own wants and put it on helping people who have much more fundamental needs. This goal is cheapened if we support any charities other than the best we can find.

We like the idea of giving to charity in someone’s name as a gift for the holidays. We’ve recently made this possible for our top charities. We just think these gifts should be made to the best charities possible.

My favorite cause used to be U.S. equality of opportunity. But over the years since we started GiveWell, I’ve become more and more convinced that the best giving opportunities for individual donors lie in the area of global health and nutrition.

Fundamentally, this area stands out because it involves a lot of interventions that have measurable, demonstrable, quantifiable benefits, yet also haven’t been funded to reach everyone who can benefit from them. (See our list.) It’s the only aid area I know of fitting this description. This has made charities working in this area a good fit for our criteria.

One might retort that this just shows our criteria to have the problem of focusing on what can be measured, rather than on what’s best, but I would disagree. I think that there are good reasons to believe that the cause of global health and nutrition really does contain the best - and not just the most easily understood - giving opportunities.

• Global health and nutrition interventions have the most impressive track record in international aid, with the possible exception of funding scientific research. I believe (though we are still investigating this) that the same holds for aid in general. To some extent this may be an artifact of how measurable the goals are, but it’s still a point in this cause’s favor.
• Global health and nutrition interventions are incredibly cheap on a per-person basis. We don’t have “cost per life saved” type figures for any programs outside of health, largely because the effects of these programs aren’t well-known enough. But consider that
  • An insecticide-treated net costs under $6, and a deworming treatment costs around 50c - these figures include all shipping costs, administration costs, etc. By contrast, GiveDirectly’s cash transfers cost $500 per household per year; the promising Ultra Poor Graduation program appears to have similar costs (PDF, pg 3); educating a child, even in the poorest countries, costs $50+ (sometimes much more) per year (PDF pg 39); even in microfinance, $12-17 per year is spent in grants alone for each current person who is served by microfinance. Programs that don’t target the poorest of the poor - such as U.S. programs - cost far more. These are far from apples-to-apples comparisons, but my intuition is that the health interventions compare favorably on “quality-of-life impact for the money.”
  • Speaking more informally, on our site visits it has struck me how lean health interventions often are. Because the evidence is so strong, people generally know exactly what has to be delivered, and how, in order to benefit people. This means they can design programs to deliver these crucial items and services with maximal efficiency. Other programs are much more intensive - again, for not clearly more life benefit. This observation makes the above point make more sense to me: health interventions are cheap because they are small and precisely defined but involve major known benefits.
• Health and nutrition programs are particularly good at having clear goals and accountability, leading to learning over time. Because benefits can be quantified and predicted, targets can be set, and adjustments can be made when they’re not met. We’ve been placing more emphasis on the criterion of accountability, i.e., the likelihood that giving will lead to learning. Health and nutrition interventions stand out in terms of the likelihood that giving will lead to learning.
• Room for more funding is relatively easy to gauge in the area of health and nutrition. We believe that one of the thorniest issues that a donor has to contend with is that of room for more funding. In an area like funding scientific research (which otherwise has much to recommend it as a charitable cause), it’s particularly hard to answer the question, “How does the value of the next study on the priority list - the one that no one else has funded and that my funding will make possible - compare to the value of the average study overall?” This isn’t nearly as much of an issue when delivering global health and nutrition interventions; the expected benefits of running an additional project tend to be easier to quantify.
• Health and nutrition are fundamental to quality of life. In my view, the value of additional education - or additional income - depends a lot on the context, but health and nutrition are fundamental and universal needs. In addition, with economic empowerment or education interventions, I tend to worry about the difficulty of distinguishing “zero-sum benefits” (helping some people at the expense of others) from “positive-sum benefits” - a well-intentioned business training or education program could end up simply transferring power/wealth from some people in a community to others, and this could be very difficult to distinguish from actually improving these people’s productivity. I feel this is much less of a concern when it comes to health and nutrition.

What problems are best suited to having money thrown at them?

I’m not arguing that health and nutrition are the most important issues in the world. There are many changes in the world that I’d like to see and that I believe are worth fighting for. There are many fantastic uses of money outside the sector of global health and nutrition; many involve taking risks on building institutions and producing public goods. But when thinking about how individual donors can do good, my mind jumps to the easiest ways to have impact without having special insight - the problems that are most likely to be solved by “throwing money at them.” When this is the goal, being able to measure, demonstrate and quantify one’s impact is enormously helpful.

According to our analysis, ~$5 can buy a bednet or 10 years of deworming - either of which will have a substantial, quantifiable, definite impact on quality of life. That can empower a person who is better positioned than you are to address many of their other problems. I believe that for a donor interested in making the world better just by writing a check, this sort of value-for-money may not be available in any other cause.

We feel very good about recommending that donors give to our top charities, and they’re where all GiveWell staff are – happily and confidently – giving our personal donations this year.

That said, we’re skeptical by nature, and internally, we keep thinking about and discussing the ways in which our top charities might not work out: i.e., the scenarios/circumstances in which giving to these charities doesn’t accomplish what we expect or our views change substantially in the next year about what donations to these charities accomplish.

If I were going to write the equivalent of a “dissenting opinion” for our top charities, it would be based on the issues below.

AMF: insecticide-treated net distributions

Our #1-ranked organization is the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF). Our recommendation relies on the fact that there have been numerous randomized controlled trials (RCTs, i.e., high-quality studies) tying net distributions to reductions in childhood mortality, but there’s a question of external validity for these RCTs. Is it reasonable to assume that net distributions of the type AMF carries out will have the same sort of effects they’ve had in the studies? There are a couple of reasons to question whether they will.

In our analysis of the RCTs, we found one trial where researchers conducted random spot checks to people’s houses at 5 in the morning to make sure that nets were being used. In another case, researchers, themselves, installed the nets in participants’ homes. In general, we had the impression that researchers were working hard to make sure that nets were used as intended. While AMF’s distributions (and large-scale distributions in general) involve some measures for community education and monitoring of usage, we don’t think they’re comparable to what was done in the RCTs.

For nets to be effective, people need to use them appropriately and consistently. It’s not hard to imagine someone receiving a net one day, but over time not consistently using it well.

The best available data seems to indicate that on a large scale, people use their nets relatively consistently - in line with the usage rates seen in the RCTs (which did not, themselves, reach 100% usage). But the best available data isn’t as robust as we’d like it to be, particularly when it comes to the distinction between “reported usage” and “actual usage” (our best attempts to adjust for this indicate that it is not a major issue, but we aren’t working off much information).

Another way in which large-scale net distributions could fail to live up to the small-scale studies has to do with malaria transmission dynamics. It’s possible that mosquito populations and transmission dynamics have changed in the several years since the last small-scale study was done; it’s possible that the studies were done in areas that were unusually well-suited to seeing big drops in malaria come from nets; it’s even possible that widespread use of nets could lead to increasing resistance in mosquito populations over time. We haven’t seen any strong reasons to believe that any of these things are the case; in particular, we don’t believe that data on transmission dynamics is strong enough for the small-scale studies to have picked out particularly favorable settings. But it’s a definite point of uncertainty.

One point of reassurance here: as we observed previously, the malaria control community spends a huge amount of money on distributing nets. So if one of these concerns ends up being a huge problem, finding out about it (as we hope AMF will) could be hugely beneficial in and of itself, by helping the malaria community better execute distributions and/or better allocate resources.

SCI: deworming

Our evidence review of deworming concludes that there isn’t a particularly strong case that deworming has a significant impact on individuals’ life outcomes. The evidence boils down to (a) two well-respected but far-from-ironclad research papers on the long-term effects of deworming and (b) a large degree of evidence that deworming has a consistent (but limited) impact on haemoglobin levels (which are measured to determine anemia). Our positive view of deworming stems from the fact that although there is limited evidence of quality-of-life significance, the intervention is so cheap that it is likely to be a relatively good buy and may be a great buy.

Our view of deworming is highly susceptible to change based on evidence. A single pre-registered, large-sample RCT that did not find significant impacts on development for dewormed children would significantly adjust our view about the likely impacts of deworming. Combing through the data of one of the existing papers on deworming – which we plan to do in 2012 – could easily adjust our view of the intervention. In addition, despite the fact that SCI’s evidence of impact is as strong as we’ve ever seen in a charity, we still have our doubts about it.

Given this situation, it’s not hard to picture a world in which our view shifts substantially by the end of next year.

Both organizations

Both AMF and SCI partner with governments and NGOs to implement their prorgrams. This means that neither is in complete control of their activities and they could run into problems caused by, among other things, (a) lack of funding for the components of their programs that they don’t directly fund (more on this in Holden’s recent post about charitable leverage) or (b) governments changing their minds about working with each. Note that SCI has already had one program (in Zambia) where results have been quite disappointing and data remains thin.

Difficulty in dealing with partners is a significant risk in aid, and one we’ve learned about this past year from some of the challenges VillageReach is facing in its scaleup in Mozambique.

Putting the dissents in context

The above concerns are very real, but they’re much smaller than the concerns we have for any other charity in existence.

Some seem to believe that concerns ought to be hidden from donors, to encourage them to give. This may make sense for many donors. When dealing with our own audience, we feel much better asking you to give with eyes wide open: recognize that there are no guarantees, but that the things your money can accomplish - in terms of improving others’ lives - are incredible. We think that’s more than enough reason to give without regret.

People sometimes ask us whether they should give now, or save their money and give (including the interest/returns they accrue on their money) later. We don’t think there’s a clear answer. Here are the major issues as I see them, when thinking about my own giving. Bottom line - my favored strategy at the moment is to give regularly (a set percentage of my income each year).

Will tomorrow’s giving opportunities be better than today’s?

GiveWell’s progress may lead to better giving opportunities in the near future. I believe GiveWell’s research is the best available for identifying great giving opportunities; but GiveWell is still a very young organization, and we still have a lot to learn. It’s very possible that we’ll find much better giving opportunites in the future.

On the flip side, our growth and learning depends on growing our money moved. Giving to our top charities today helps this happen.

None of the best giving opportunities I see today are guaranteed to be good opportunities next year. In some cases (particularly VillageReach in 2010), giving now may be crucial to an organization’s development. Even when this isn’t the case, there’s always the possibility that the organization will improve its fundraising - or make a contact with a large funder - in the future, affecting its room for more funding.

Economic growth, increased giving, and smarter giving may mean that giving opportunities are worse in the far future. We’ve written before about the idea that the more good is being done by others, the fewer opportunities you have to do a lot of good with your own giving. We hope to see a day where no one is so poor/underserved that you can save their life by giving few thousand dollars.

Do I “earn interest” by saving now and giving later?
If I save, I earn interest/returns on my money; but if I give, the good I accomplish may “earn interest” too. Ideally, donations give people more power over their lives, which in turn leaves them better positioned to help others (in their community or elsewhere). We take seriously the idea that most problems may be better addressed by local communities than by outside aid; we focus our outside aid on the problems we feel it is best-suited to address.

In general, I would guess that the conceptual “interest rate on empowering people” is higher than the interest rate you earn when you save. This is because the same basic mechanism underlies both (having more resources today can allow a person to generate more resources for the future), but savers get paid directly for providing resources, while donors don’t (thus, there is likely more “unmet need” for donations than for savings). Given today’s interest rates, it seems particularly likely that the “interest rate on empowering people” is higher than the interest rate you earn when you save.

Other issues

Giving now means “putting my money where my mouth is.” I believe that having my own money at stake helps me think harder, more concretely, and more realistically about where I should be giving and what results I’m expecting from my giving. This in turn helps me learn over time.

I think the same applies, to a lesser extent, to donors who are relying on GiveWell’s research rather than doing their own - giving now may help you think through what questions to check GiveWell’s answers to, and consider how you feel about relying on GiveWell’s research vs. going in another direction.

If I postponed substantial giving for a long time, I’d worry that I was giving myself an excuse not to give at all.

Giving regularly and predictably is more helpful to the group(s) I’m supporting. In general, people tend to give the same donations each year,* and I believe that charities often plan around this fact. (We certainly do, both when considering our operating expenses and when considering our money moved.) Therefore, if you give irregularly (particularly if your donations go down over time), you are sending an inaccurate message to a charity and may be negatively affecting its ability to plan, unless you take specific efforts to communicate your plans (and even when you do so, this may create extra hassle for the charity).

Bottom line. In general, my preferred approach is to give relatively regularly; I think there are substantial disadvantages (discussed above) to deviating from this approach in either direction (giving a lot now and only a little later, or giving a little now with the intent of giving a lot later).

At some point I may spot a giving opportunity that seems like a true outlier, and focus my giving on that opportunity rather than giving regularly over time. To give one example of this - when we started GiveWell, we believed that our startup funds were critical, and thus we encouraged donors to give a large amount immediately even if it meant abstaining from giving for the next year or two. Several did exactly this, and I think in hindsight it was the right decision (their 2007 gifts were in fact critical for our getting off the ground, in a way that they wouldn’t have been a year later). So I do think there can be good reason to “over-give” now and hold back later, or to save now and give more later. But right now I don’t see any compelling argument for deviating from “give a set percentage of my income each year.”

*Our experience suggests this; the Money for Good study suggests it as well (see page 16).

This time of year, just about every news agency publishes an article titled something like “6 tips to give wisely this holiday season.” (Examples here, here, and here.) The advice they give makes sense to a degree – make sure the charity isn’t a scam, check that the CEO’s salary doesn’t account for 90% of the charity’s budget, etc. - but it’s really targeted at someone who’s aiming to not waste his/her money. For donors interested in accomplishing the most good possible with their money, here are 6 tips to help you take your giving to the next level.

1. Be proactive. If you find yourself considering a gift to a charity that called you on the phone, you’ve already lost most of the battle to do as much good as possible. Your dollars will go furthest if you set time aside, think about all your options, and go find the best charity for your values. If you wait for charities to come to you, you’re just rewarding the ones that are most aggressive - not the ones that do the most good.

2. Be open minded about the cause you’re going to support. The amount you can accomplish with your donation varies widely from cause to cause to cause. We’ve written about this before in the context of giving to charities that work overseas instead of those that work domestically.

But, even if you’re not ready to shift your giving that much, you can improve your impact just by broadening your scope. Are you interested in supporting education in the US? Consider organizations that work outside your community as opposed to just considering local ones. Are you interested in supporting your local community? Consider multiple different categories of organization - job training programs, schools, food banks, etc. The more you’re open to different options, the more likely you’ll be to find and support outstanding – not just “acceptable” – organizations.

3. Ask organizations to make a case that their programs work. For example, if you pick a school, ask them why they think they’re improving academic performance for their students; ask them why they think they’re doing a better job than a similar school you could support; ask them for any data they have that supports their case. For more ideas about what to ask, refer to our do-it-yourself charity evaluation questions.

4. Ask organizations how they’d use additional funding. It’s one thing for an organization to have accomplished great things in the past. But, if you’re giving today, you really need to focus on what they’ll do in the future and how your donation (and other future donations) will make a difference.

Some organizations may have a pressing need for funds such that additional money this year will allow them to expand services. Others may already have enough in the bank such that your donation will only grow an already-safe level of reserves. Alternatively, the organization may be so small that money isn’t the bottleneck to expansion, and it can’t effectively expand even with more money.

We call this the concept of room for more funding, and it’s key to GiveWell’s assessment of our top charities.

5. When you give, give cash - no strings attached. You’re just a part-time donor, but the charity you’re supporting does this full-time and staff there probably know a lot more about how to do their job than you do. If you’ve found a charity that you feel is excellent - not just acceptable - then it makes sense to trust the charity to make good decisions about how to spend your money.

6. Check back a year later and see whether the organization met its commitments. When asking about the organizations about their room for more funding or evidence of impact, you (hopefully) heard about plans they had for the coming year. Check back to see how their activities - and results - match up.

These tips may making giving sound like a full time job. We think it is. You can leverage the work we’ve done, and save your own time, with a gift to one of our top charities. But if you’re interested in causes we haven’t been able to cover, the above tips will help you make the most of your generosity.

The Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI) told us earlier this year that it had received a donation of praziquantel (the more expensive of the drugs it uses for deworming) from World Vision. Since it already has the drugs, donations can pay just for delivery costs. Thus, SCI observed, your gift is “leveraged” - $1 in donations buys more than $1 in health programming, since the drugs are essentially “free.”

The Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) in some ways achieves leverage through the opposite strategy. It doesn’t pay for the costs of distributing nets or even shipping nets - it only pays for the nets themselves. Partners are charged with raising funding elsewhere for shipping and distribution (though they are required to do these things; nets aren’t granted without a distribution plan in place). By adhering to this policy, AMF puts other funders - including some government agencies - in a similar situation to SCI’s donors: the nets are essentially “free,” so $1 from these agencies buys far more than $1 in health programming. Because of this dynamic, these other funders (AMF argues, correctly from what we can see) are happy to provide this funding - so the original donor’s gift is “leveraged” too (by buying just a net, the donor gets “free” shipping/distribution costs).

How far could this logic be extended? What if a charity first raised money for travel expenses, then went to another donor and raised money for field staff arguing that “travel expenses are essentially free,” then went to another donor and raised money for supplies arguing that “field staff and travel expenses are essentially free,” etc.? What if a charity went to 50 million separate donors, asking each to give $1 contingent on each of the other 49,999,999 giving as well, arguing that this created 50,000,000:1 leverage for each of the $1 donors?

We think that much of our discussion of donation matching applies here. If you take claims of “leverage” literally, you’re allowing other funders - the ones who gave pills, or nets, or covered distribution costs - to influence your giving merely through the structure of their gift. That in turn creates incentives for them to take gifts they would have made anyway, and structure them in a way that gets you to give more to the program of their choice. In fact, these other donors may even be taking advantage of you to pay for costs they would have been happy to cover themselves. Perhaps World Vision would pay for distribution, but knows that by giving “only pills” it can get others to pay for distribution. Perhaps AMF would pay for distribution if it had to, and doesn’t only because it believes it can get others to.

Understanding the true nature of leverage - who is the “leverager” and who is the “leveragee” - is difficult. When someone else is giving contingent on your giving, and this fact in turn influences your giving … sometimes this means that you’re getting them to give more (or differently) than they would have otherwise (in which case you’re the “leverager”) and sometimes it means the reverse (in which case you’re the “leveragee”). We don’t know of any easy/reliable way to tell which situation you’re looking at, and when.

With this in mind, our general principles for considering leverage are:

• You can’t take “leverage factors” at face value, for largely the same reasons that you can’t take donation matches at face value.
• It’s probably a good thing when the charity you support is engaging in some sort of “leveraging.” This means it’s putting thought into getting your funds to influence others’ funds. If you believe that you’re supporting the most impactful charity possible, this means that others’ funds may be moving from less impactful activities to more impactful activities. (Though the situation isn’t this simple: we believe that governments and other large funders often have a much better array of options for impactful giving than the individual donors we serve.)
• The exact relationship between the claimed “leverage” and your actual impact is very non-straightforward. It may seem that you have more “leverage” when your $1 causes someone else to spend $9, as opposed to when it gets someone else to spend 10c. However, in the former situation, there’s a much higher probability that you are in fact the “leveragee” - that the other funder would cover the other 10% themselves if it weren’t for you, and you’re just saving them money. In general, it seems to us that the higher your claimed “leverage,” the greater the probability that someone else is in fact leveraging you.

  If anything, we would guess that your true impact is higher when the “leverage” is well under 100% (i.e., the other funder is giving less than $1 for each $1 you give), implying that the other party is likely providing funding because of the “leverage” they attain rather than because they would want to fund the project on their own. Once you have another major funder covering a major chunk of the costs, it becomes more important to ask whether they would be willing to cover all of them if the “leverage” from you and similar donors weren’t available.

When we do cost-effectiveness estimates (e.g., “cost per life saved”) we consider all expenses from all sources, not just funding provided by GiveWell donors. For SCI, we count both drug and delivery costs, even when drugs are donated. (Generally, we try to count all donated goods and services at market value, i.e., the price the donor could have sold them for instead of donating them.) For AMF, we count net costs and distribution costs, even though AMF pays only for the former. In the case of VillageReach, we even count government costs of delivering vaccines, even though VillageReach works exclusively to improve the efficiency of the delivery system.

We consider this approach the simplest approach to dealing with the issues discussed here, and given our limited understanding of how “leverage” works, we believe that this approach minimizes the error in our estimates that might come from misreading the “leverage” situation. As our understanding of “leverage” improves, we may approach our cost-effectiveness estimates differently.