The GiveWell Blog

Why we recommend so few charities

This post seeks to address a common misconception about our work, and will in the future be linked from an FAQ. We often encounter confusion around the fact that we recommend so few charities. Some take this as a statement that “very few charities are accomplishing good,” but this is very much an incorrect interpretation….

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Trying (and failing) to find more funding gaps for delivering proven cost-effective interventions

There are interventions that we believe are – or may be (pending a literature review) – very well supported by evidence, that we’ve been unable to find charities focused on. In 2012, we put a significant amount of effort into trying to find ways donors could pay for further delivery of these interventions, even if…

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Update on GiveWell’s plans for 2013

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] Previously, we wrote about the need to trade off time spent on (a) our charities that meet our traditional criteria vs. (b) broadening our research to include new causes (the work we’ve been referring to as GiveWell Labs). This post goes…

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GiveWell annual review for 2012: Details on GiveWell’s money moved and web traffic

This is the final post (of five) we have made focused on our self-evaluation and future plans. This post lays out highlights from our metrics report for 2012. For more detail, see our full metrics report (PDF). 1. In 2012, GiveWell tracked $9.57 million in money moved based on our recommendations, a significant increase over…

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Why I didn’t give to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative last year

Before publishing this post, I sent a draft to Alan Fenwick, Director of the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative who asked colleagues of his to comment. We asked each person for their permission to post their comments, and we’ve posted those for which we received permission here: Dr. Dan Colley’s comments (PDF). Dr. Colley is the Director…

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External evaluation of our research

We’ve long been interested in the idea of subjecting our research to formal external evaluation. We publish the full details of our analysis so that anyone may critique it, but we also recognize that it can take a lot of work to digest and critique our analysis, and we want to be subjecting ourselves to…

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