We feel very good about recommending that donors give to our top charities, and they’re where all GiveWell staff are – happily and confidently – giving our personal donations this year. That said, we’re skeptical by nature, and internally, we keep thinking about and discussing the ways in which our top charities might not work…
The GiveWell Blog
Month: December 2011
Give now or give later?
People sometimes ask us whether they should give now, or save their money and give (including the interest/returns they accrue on their money) later. We don’t think there’s a clear answer. Here are the major issues as I see them, when thinking about my own giving. Bottom line – my favored strategy at the moment…
6 tips for giving like a pro
This time of year, just about every news agency publishes an article titled something like “6 tips to give wisely this holiday season.” (Examples here, here, and here.) The advice they give makes sense to a degree – make sure the charity isn’t a scam, check that the CEO’s salary doesn’t account for 90% of…
Leverage in charity
The Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI) told us earlier this year that it had received a donation of praziquantel (the more expensive of the drugs it uses for deworming) from World Vision. Since it already has the drugs, donations can pay just for delivery costs. Thus, SCI observed, your gift is “leveraged” – $1 in donations…
Why you shouldn’t let “donation matching” affect your giving
We know that donors love donation matching.* We know that if we could offer donation matching on gifts to our top charities this giving season, our money moved would rise. And we know that we could offer donation matching if we thought it was the right thing to do: there are donors planning six-figure gifts…
Deciding between two outstanding charities
We’ve recently published our updated charity recommendations, featuring two top charities (Against Malaria Foundation and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative) that score well on all of our criteria. In this post, we discuss how we decided which of these two charities to rank #1 and which to rank #2. Both charities are executing health programs that deliver…