The GiveWell Blog

Evaluating people

A crucial consideration, when evaluating a giving opportunity, is: “Who are the people involved?” I believe that any given project is likely to run into many factors that are unexpected (or can’t be captured in the evaluation process), and indeed that such unexpected factors often dominate the expected factors. Therefore, no matter how promising a…

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Revisiting the case for insecticide-treated nets (ITNs)

GiveWell seeks to constantly revisit and rethink our content, to make sure that it continues to represent a reasonable interpretation of the currently available facts. To this end, we assigned Jonah Sinick, a Research Analyst, to perform a thorough review of the content most relevant to our #1 charity (the Against Malaria Foundation): the AMF…

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Sharing notes from conversations: Case study in pursuing transparency in philanthropy

Early in our history, we got most of our information in the form of documents: grant applications and other documents sent to us by charities, academic literature, etc. Being transparent about why we believe what we believe was thus relatively straightforward: we sought to publish whatever documents we could. Over time, phone and in-person conversations…

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Update on GiveWell’s web traffic / money moved: Q3 2012

In addition to evaluations of other charities, GiveWell publishes substantial evaluation on itself, from the quality of its research to its impact on donations. We publish quarterly updates regarding two key metrics: (a) donations to top charities and (b) web traffic. The charts below present basic information about our growth in money moved and web…

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