The GiveWell Blog

Announcing a call for grant applicants in Southeast Asia and Bangladesh

February 13, 2019 | by Catherine Hollander

Today, we announced a grantmaking process to look for outstanding organizations operating in Southeast Asia and Bangladesh.

We’re working with Affinity Impact, a social impact initiative founded by the children of a Taiwanese entrepreneur, to provide three grants—one $250,000, and two $25,000 grants—to organizations that are operating programs in global health and development in any of the following countries: Bangladesh, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Philippines, and Vietnam.

One of the goals of this grantmaking process is to help us better understand the giving opportunities in a geography in which we haven’t previously focused, and to learn from the grantmaking process whether doing so is an effective way to engage with philanthropists who don’t plan to support our current top charities. An overview of this process is available here. Details of the application process are here. Applications are due on April 1, 2019.

If you represent an organization applying or considering applying for the grant and have any additional questions, please contact us directly via email at applications@givewell.org and mention that you’re applying for the “2019 GiveWell Grants for Global Health and Development in Southeast Asia and Bangladesh.” We will try to respond as quickly as possible.

Schedule a quick call to make giving easier

December 20, 2018 | by Catherine Hollander

If you’re thinking about where to give to charity this year and it would be helpful to speak with a member of GiveWell’s staff about your decision, please let us know. We’re happy to answer questions sent to info@givewell.org or to schedule a call via the form here.

On a call, we’d be glad to:

Provide an overview of our recommendations. We know it can be time-consuming to read and digest all of the content on our website. We’re glad to share a quick summary of our top charities list.
Assist with the logistics of making a donation and discuss different options for donating, such as appreciated securities, checks, and wire transfers.
Answer any questions about our research or recommendations.

Due to limited staff capacity, it’s possible we won’t be able to speak with everyone who requests a call, although based on past experience we hope to be able to connect with anyone who gets in touch.

We look forward to hearing from you!

December 2018 open thread

December 12, 2018 | 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.

You can view our September 2018 open thread here.

Staff members’ personal donations for giving season 2018

December 10, 2018 (updated on: December 10, 2018) | by Catherine Hollander

For this post, GiveWell staff members wrote up the thinking behind their personal donations for the year. We made similar posts in previous years.((See our staff giving posts from 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013.)) Staff are listed in order of their start dates at GiveWell.

You can click the below links to jump to a staff member’s entry:

Our updated top charities for giving season 2018

November 26, 2018 (updated on: October 3, 2019) | by Catherine Hollander

We’re excited to share our list of top charities for the 2018 giving season. We recommend eight top charities, all of which we also recommended last year.

Our bottom line

We recommend three top charities implementing programs whose primary benefit is reducing deaths. They are:

Five of our top charities implement programs that aim to increase recipients’ incomes and consumption. They are:

These charities represent the best opportunities we’re aware of to help people, according to our criteria. We expect GiveWell’s recommendations to direct more than $100 million to these organizations collectively over the next year. We expect our top charities to be able to effectively absorb hundreds of millions of dollars beyond that amount.

Our list of top charities is the same as it was last year, with the exception of Evidence Action’s No Lean Season. We removed No Lean Season from the list following our review of the results of a 2017 study of the program.

We also recognize a group of standout charities. We believe these charities are implementing programs that are evidence-backed and may be extremely cost-effective. However, we do not feel as confident in the impact of these organizations as we do in our top charities. We provide more information about our standout organizations here.

Where do we recommend donors give?

We recommend that donors choose the “Grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion” option on our donation forms. We grant these funds quarterly to the GiveWell top charity or top charities where we believe they can do the most good.
If you prefer to give to a specific charity, we believe that all of our top charities are outstanding and will use additional funding effectively. If we had additional funds to allocate now, the most likely recipient would be Malaria Consortium to scale up its work providing seasonal malaria chemoprevention.
If you have supported GiveWell’s operations in the past, we ask that you maintain your support. If you have not supported GiveWell’s operations in the past, we ask that you consider designating 10 percent of your donation to help fund GiveWell’s operations.

How should donors give?

For donors giving up to $1,000, we recommend donating by credit card here.
If you’re planning to give more than $1,000, we recommend donating by check, bank transfer, or securities transfer.
This page has additional options for donating. Check out our tips for giving efficiently to maximize the impact of your donation.

Conference call to discuss recommendations

We’re holding a conference call on Tuesday, December 4, at 12pm ET/9am PT to discuss our latest recommendations and to answer any questions you have. Sign up here to join the call.

Additional details

Below, we provide:

An overview of the research we conducted in 2018 that was directly relevant to these recommendations. More
An explanation of changes to our recommended charity list and of major updates in the past year. More
The funding allocation that we are recommending to Good Ventures and our top charities’ remaining room for more funding. More
Our recommendations for people interested in supporting our top charities. More

Our recommendation to Good Ventures

November 26, 2018 (updated on: November 27, 2018) | by Catherine Hollander

Today, we announce our list of top charities for the 2018 giving season. We expect to direct over $100 million to the eight charities on our list as a result of our recommendation.

Good Ventures, a large foundation with which we work closely, is the largest single funder of our top charities. We make recommendations to Good Ventures each year for how much funding to provide to our top charities and how to allocate that funding among them. As this funding is significant, we think it’s important for other donors to take into account the recommendation we make to Good Ventures.

This blog post explains in detail how we decide what to recommend to Good Ventures and why; we want to be transparent about the research that leads us to our recommendations to Good Ventures. If you’re interested in a bottom-line recommendation for where to donate this year, please view our post with recommendations for non-Good Ventures donors.

Note that Good Ventures has not finalized its plans for the year and may give differently from what we’ve recommended. We think it’s unlikely that any differences would have major implications for our bottom-line recommendations for other donors.

Summary

In this post, we discuss:

How we decided how much funding to recommend Good Ventures provide to our top charities.
Our recommendation for how Good Ventures should allocate that funding among our top charities, and how we arrived at that allocation:
- Principles we followed
- Our process

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