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.
