This seems like a very worthwhile initiative, and I’m glad you’re undertaking it. Given that, applying your traditional criteria, you only recommend 2% of the charities you review, a project that’s designed to explore what the rigid application of your criteria might be missing seems likely to unearth at least a few gems. I’ll look forward to future posts on how you’re going to tackle the evaluative challenge, how flexible or inflexible you’ll be about including social enterprises, etc. Good luck!

Regards,
Paul

We will be writing a lot more about our criteria and process for assessing giving opportunities.

Jeff, we’re not restricting ourselves to nonprofits necessarily, though in practice I would guess that those will be where the best opportunities lie.

Thanks for your response. I guess my question was more getting at whether or not you will consider for-profit entities not because of financial returns, but because of the possibility that some ventures/models will be more impactful with a for-profit model. Limiting to one “sector” (not just a sub-sector within the nonprofit sector) can have your “donors” miss out on some big social returns.

Thanks,

Jeff

How about a donation to an orphaned disease research charity where there might be huge improvements in quality of life, but for small numbers of people?

I recommend you research New Harvest (www.new-harvest.org) through GiveWell Labs because:
- We raise over 60 land billion animals a year for food
- Most of these are factory-farmed
- This is also a huge burden on the environment
- Converting people to veganism/vegetarianism is a huge challenge; in recent decades, there has been little change in the number of vegans/vegetarians in the US and the UK, despite massive lobbying from animal rights organisations
- Technical solutions, e.g. in vitro meat, which New Harvest develops, seem more promising, particularly since there are few interest groups opposed to it.
- In vitro meat development is chronically underfunded.

• GiveWell Labs is still about giving, not making money. We won’t be looking at opportunities that claim (or ought to claim) strong enough potential for returns to be justifiable based on pure money-making motives.
• There may be some opportunities to make investments with some expected returns, but not enough to be justifiable based on pure money-making motives. In these cases, one might think of these investments as “gifts” where the gift is the size of the discrepancy between actual expected returns and the expected returns one would need to justify participation based on pure money-making motives. We will be potentially open to recommending these sorts of opportunities, though we have our reservations about them, as we will discuss in a future post.