The GiveWell Blog

Month: March 2018

GiveWell’s money moved and web traffic in 2016

(updated on: ) | by Natalie Crispin

In September 2017, we posted an interim update on GiveWell’s 2016 money moved and web traffic. This post summarizes the key takeaways from our full 2016 money moved and web traffic metrics report. Note that some of the numbers, including the total headline money moved, have changed since our interim report. Since then, we decided to exclude some donations from our headline money moved figure (details in the full report), and we corrected some minor errors.

This report was highly delayed (as discussed in the interim update). We expect to publish our report on GiveWell’s 2017 money moved and web traffic much more quickly; our current expectation is that we will publish that report by the end of June.

GiveWell is dedicated to finding outstanding giving opportunities and publishing the full details of our analysis. In addition to evaluations of other charities, we publish substantial evaluation of our own work. This post lays out highlights from our 2016 metrics report, which reviews what we know about how our research impacted donors.

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Considering policy advocacy organizations: Why GiveWell made a grant to the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention

(updated on: ) | by Isabel Arjmand

In August 2017, GiveWell recommended a grant of $1.3 million to the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention (CPSP). This grant was made as part of GiveWell’s Incubation Grants program to seed the development of potential future GiveWell top charities and to grow the pipeline of organizations we can consider for a recommendation. CPSP implements a different type of program from work GiveWell has funded in the past. Namely, CPSP identifies the pesticides which are most commonly used in suicides and advocates for governments to ban the most lethal pesticides.

Because CPSP’s goal is to encourage governments to enact bans, its work falls into the broader category of policy advocacy, an area we are newly focused on. We plan to investigate or are in the process of investigating several other policy causes, including tobacco control, lead paint regulation, and measures to improve road traffic safety.

Summary

This post will discuss:

  • GiveWell’s interest in researching policy advocacy interventions as possible priority programs. (More)
  • Why CPSP is promising as a policy advocacy organization and Incubation Grant recipient. (More)
  • Our plans for following CPSP’s work going forward. (More)

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March 2018 open thread

| by Catherine Hollander

Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.

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