The GiveWell Blog

Announcing our 2019 top charities

We’re excited to announce our top charities for 2019. After thousands of hours of vetting and review, eight charities stood out as excellent.

These charities work on evidence-backed and impactful health and poverty alleviation programs serving people in the poorest parts of the world. We’ve identified specific opportunities for our top charities to use an additional $75 million in donations to save 33,000 lives, $30 million to treat 36 million children for parasitic worm infections, and $450 million to provide unconditional cash transfers to 375,000 extremely low-income individuals. Our expectation is that our top charities can effectively use even more funding than that—that’s just a starting point.

Our 2019 recommendation: “Grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion”

Our top recommendation for donors giving in 2019 is to give to “Grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion.” We will grant these funds each quarter to the top charity or charities where we believe they will have the greatest impact.

The top charity we model as having the highest impact per additional dollar can change throughout the year. To inform our understanding, we ask our top charities to provide us with updated information on an ongoing basis. For example, a top charity may share that it has found new opportunities for impact, such as the potential to work in a new country with a significant need for its program.

In addition, top charities typically receive funding from GiveWell donors and other sources on an ongoing basis. We update our expectations of how much additional funding charities need each quarter by incorporating funding they have received since our last allocation of “Grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion.”

Summary

  • Our 2019 top charities (More)
  • How we prioritize our top charities’ funding needs (More)
  • New information we learned in 2019 (More)
  • Giving to GiveWell’s operations (More)
  • Tips for donating efficiently (More)
  • Questions? (More)
  • More information on our top charities and 2019 review process (More)

Read More

We’re offering matching funds to new donors via podcasts. Here’s why.

We’re offering matching funds to new donors who hear about our work on podcast advertisements. A donor has agreed to make a 1:1 match of any donations to GiveWell and/or our top and standout charities. The donor will match up to $1,000 per new donor until the matching funds run out.

Offering donation matching will enable us to better track the impact of the ads we fund. However, we’ve been critical of donation matching in the past. This post will explain why and how we’re planning to match donations today.

Read More

Why you might get a letter from us this giving season

We’re about to launch another outreach experiment: mailing letters.

Summary

This giving season, we’re planning to send a subset of approximately 4,500 GiveWell donors a physical letter encouraging them to renew or increase their support of GiveWell’s top charities. We’ve never done broad outreach to encourage donations through physical mail before.

In the letter, we plan to share our list of top charities, our overall recommendation for donors, and remit materials for individuals who feel compelled to give. We hope the letter helps communicate our research to a group of individuals who have found our work useful in the past to guide their giving. We plan to assess the success of this experiment based on incremental donations that result from the letters.

Read More

What are standout charities?

GiveWell’s research process focuses on finding excellent giving opportunities and deeply reviewing them. We currently recommend just eight top charities that have met our high standards.

Although the number of top charities we recommend is small, we review a large number of organizations in our ongoing work to find new top charities. We consider some of these groups to be exceptional relative to the vast majority of organizations, even though they do not meet our top charity standards. We name these organizations standout charities to recognize their exceptional status and to provide an incentive for charities to engage with our intensive review process.

The standout charity designation, though valuable for the reasons mentioned above, has created communication challenges for us. People who rely on our recommendations to make donations have expressed confusion about how our view of standout charities compares to that of top charities.

This blog post will explain why we have standout charities and how they differ from our top charities.

Read More