Over the past several years, GiveWell has been focused on growing, deepening, and improving our research team’s work in line with our core values of truth-seeking and transparency. As part of that effort, we’ve invited anonymous assessment of our grantmaking process in order to learn and improve.

In July 2024, we sent out our first anonymous survey to people we’ve worked with during grant investigations. While we typically ask for candid, live feedback from the organizations we work with, we had not previously invited anonymous assessment of our grantmaking process. The survey sought to better understand the extent to which we live out our values in our interactions with external organizations. The questions focused on organizations’ experiences with our grant investigation process and post-grant follow-up.

In 2025, we repeated the process with the same survey instrument and compared results to the prior year, to see what had changed and whether our daily work is reflecting our core values and operating principles.

GiveWell’s second annual grant investigation survey was sent to organizations that participated in our grant investigation process from April 2024 through July 2025.¹We sent the same survey in two segments, one in February 2025 and one in September 2025. We invited a total of 122 individuals representing 75 organizations to participate, and we received 80 responses (66% response rate). Included in the total were 22 contacts from investigations that did not result in a grant, from which we received five responses.

What we learned

This year’s respondents rated their satisfaction with GiveWell’s investigation process higher than last year’s respondents: 4.6 out of 5 in 2025 compared to 4.2 out of 5 in 2024. Among the survey questions, GiveWell received particularly high scores for honest, professional, and transparent communication, and for showing respect to organizations and treating them as experts in their field.

While the response rates of the 2024 and 2025 surveys were similar—58% in 2024 compared to 66% in 2025—the sample size for the 2025 survey was substantially larger: 80 in 2025 compared to 32 in 2024. The larger sample size is largely a result of GiveWell’s rapidly increasing grant volume: we invited more than twice as many people to respond in the 2025 survey, one for each grant investigation we completed.

In addition to improvements in several areas, including overall satisfaction and satisfaction with the length of our grant investigations,²The average rating for satisfaction with the length of our investigations was 4.1 in 2025 compared to 3.8 in 2024; this remains a relative weak point. we noted two new themes in the 2025 results. First, five respondents (~6%) proactively reported gaining value from GiveWell and its network beyond funding or programmatic suggestions. This included instances where GiveWell shared data from similar programs, made suggestions based on monitoring and evaluation best practices, and connected organizations with experts or other implementers. Second, nine respondents (~11%) added comments expressing appreciation for GiveWell’s flexibility, speed, and responsiveness to the US aid freeze, cuts, and resulting uncertainty.

Additionally, the survey results indicate several key areas where we can continue to improve our grant investigation process, which we are actively working to address:

• Ensuring that we clearly communicate why we are asking for information and how the information will be used. This includes how information may impact our cost-effectiveness estimates, what we expect to learn from the grant, or how the information will feed into our qualitative decisions.
• Proactively finding more ways to share our knowledge with implementing organizations and to connect implementing organizations to each other, with subject matter experts, and with others in the field.
• Sharing what we’ve learned from monitoring and evaluation data with partners and building a shared understanding of best practices.
• Continuing to identify high-impact funding opportunities through requests for proposals and open funding calls (for example, our request for information for water chlorination programs), which are newer mechanisms for GiveWell.

Our next steps

We plan to conduct the survey again in 2026 and to collect feedback through other methods to identify areas for improvement. This will allow us to compare trends over time and look for patterns related to the size of grants, research areas, or other characteristics.

As we look to the future, we will keep working to improve GiveWell by refining our research, collecting information from people who live and work in the countries where we fund programs, and gathering feedback from the organizations carrying out those programs. All of these efforts are aimed at our core mission: delivering more impact to help those in need as much as we can, now and in years to come.