An important question to ask when deciding where to give is “what would happen if this charity didn’t receive my donation?” To investigate this, we focus on charities’ “room for more funding,” i.e., what will additional funding for this organization allow it to do that it would not be able to do without additional support…
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Deworming might have huge impact, but might have close to zero impact
We try to communicate that there are risks involved with all of our top charity recommendations, and that none of our recommendations are a “sure thing.” Our recommendation of deworming programs (the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative and the Deworm the World Initiative), though, carries particularly significant risk (in the sense of possibly not doing much/any good,…
Weighing organizational strength vs. estimated cost-effectiveness
A major question we’ve asked ourselves internally over the last few years is how we should weigh organizational quality versus the value of the intervention that the organization is carrying out. In particular, is it better to recommend an organization we’re very impressed by and confident in that’s carrying out a good program, or better…
Challenges in finding a great Vitamin A charity
Vitamin A supplementation involves giving Vitamin A to children at risk of deficiency to prevent death and other negative health impacts. We’d be interested in supporting a charity to carry out this program, but so far we have not found one we’d like to recommend. The evidence on the effectiveness of the program raises a…
Trying out a new format: GiveWell podcast
June 17, 2016 update: we’ve received relatively few responses to our survey about the podcast, so we’re currently not planning on making more episodes. If you listened, feel free to fill out the survey or contact us. As part of our increased outreach efforts this year, we decided to make three test episodes of a…
Reservations about water quality interventions
When we started researching water quality interventions, we originally guessed that there was clear evidence that the programs were effective at improving people’s health based on our general intuitions about the programs and our initial read of the relevant Cochrane review’s bottom line. Once we dug into the details of the research, though, we realized…