The GiveWell Blog

The customer is on your side

Crif-Dogs and I have different goals. They want my money; I want their delicious bacon-wrapped hot dog. They have to listen to me and cater to me to win my $4.50 (shut up – it’s well worth it). They might think I’m an idiot to want mustard with my bacon-dog, but they give it to…

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Every time I tried to tell you, the words just came out wrong …

The latest Blog Carnival asks what donors wish nonprofits knew about them, and vice versa. In a way it’s a strange question: the idea of “wishing” knowledge on someone makes me think of forbidden love, or 8th-grade crushes, or at least Jim Croce. It doesn’t seem relevant when discussing two groups of adults that are…

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Wait till next year

I’ve talked a fair amount about the question of what a foundation should do with all the money it has left over, after giving all the money it can give for a year. Now Jon B raises an interesting alternative to both investing it traditionally and to investing it in “responsible companies”: loan it to…

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Hello, world

Other charity bloggers have been noticing us, and there have been some good discussions going on about GiveWell in other places. There really should be a better system for blog-to-blog communication, such that you can see all the conversations relevant to your blog of choice just by reading that blog’s feed … this is what…

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Where I’m coming from

Last August, I decided that I wanted to give to charity, and I started working with Holden and a few other friends researching non-profits. We thought that with a little legwork, we’d be able to find the best organization in a given cause (clean water, say) by asking each organization two very basic questions: 1)…

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Quick update

Network for Good roundup I wrote last week about the apparently high fees that Network for Good charges to process donations. Katya Andresen was good enough to stop by and give some clarifying info via comments (which you can see by clicking the link to the post). One of the major differences she pointed to…

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