The GiveWell Blog

What it takes to evaluate impact

When someone asks me what makes GiveWell different from other third-party charity evaluators, I often answer by listing all the things we’ve done in order to investigate our current top-rated charity, VillageReach.

All in all, we’ve spent hundreds of hours examining VillageReach – yet we still feel very far from being “settled” on the question of how promising its activities are. Like any outstanding opportunity to do good, VillageReach’s work involves large and complex challenges. We’ll never have 100% of the relevant information or 100% certainty on its merits, but because we’ve recommended VillageReach so highly and moved over $1 million to it, it’s important to us that we do the best we can.

It isn’t realistic to do this kind of in-depth investigation for thousands (or even hundreds) of charities. We have to save our resources for the most promising charities if we want to have a reasonable level of confidence in our top recommendations. That means we take shortcuts on less promising charities, and we don’t put in the work it would take to distinguish between “worst,” “bad,” “mediocre” and “decent” groups – we’re laser-focused on the ones that we consider “best.”

Other independent charity evaluators tend to measure themselves by how many charities they rate. They exist largely for donors who already know where they want to give, and want a basic legitimacy check before they finalize the donation. To accommodate this goal, these other evaluators need to be far less thorough and more simplified than we are. That means – in our view – that they have no realistic chance of ever meaningfully rating impact, i.e., the degree to which a charity is succeeding at its mission.

GiveWell isn’t for everyone. Donors looking to check the charity they already want to give to are better off with other resources. But for donors who don’t already have a charity in mind and are looking to maximize their impact, we don’t know of any other group that provides a comparable product.