I’m going out of town for the next week and will have only sporadic internet access. A few odds and ends:

• At our Board meeting on Tuesday the 4th, we officially named our grantees in Causes 3 (Nurse-Family Partnership) and Cause 4 (KIPP). We think both are excellent options for donors. Our writeups on these causes are drafted, but won’t be public for a few weeks yet, as we still need to clean them up and give all applicants a chance to review them. Minutes and audio from the meeting will also be available in a few weeks.
• As a result of the attention we received in January, both positive and negative, many questions were raised about our model, approach, and finances. Many of these questions are addressed in our existing FAQ, particularly relating to what about our project is unique and uniquely needed and why we feel our reviews have significant value-added, even as we acknowledge their limitations. However, some of the questions raised were not well answered, and we have used the feedback to help improve our content. We’ve added the following FAQs:
  • How can GiveWell simultaneously evaluate charities and raise money for its own grantmaking? Does that create a conflict of interest?
  • How often does your Board of Directors meet?
  • Do you conduct site visits to your applicants?
  • What is your relationship to other organizations with the name GiveWell?
• We have posted our updated budget to our Board records page, with substantially more annotations than before.
• Our focus since Jan. 1 has been completing our research on Causes 3 and 4, in the interest of giving out grants as quickly as possible. We will now be focusing on producing a writeup on our first year – what went well, what went poorly, and what we’ve learned – and our concrete plans for continuing and expanding from here.