The GiveWell Blog

All posts by Elie

The Maximum Impact Fund is now the Top Charities Fund

| by Elie

We’ve decided to rename the Maximum Impact Fund to better describe what opportunities this fund supports. The Maximum Impact Fund will now be called the Top Charities Fund.

We recently announced changes to our top charity criteria that include a new requirement for our top charities: that we have a high degree of confidence in our expectations about the impact of their programs. Alongside this update, we also introduced a new giving option, the All Grants Fund. The All Grants Fund supports the full range of GiveWell’s grantmaking and can be allocated to any grant that meets our cost-effectiveness bar—including opportunities outside of our top charities and riskier grants with high expected value.

The new All Grants Fund is a complement to what we have called our Maximum Impact Fund, which is granted to cost-effective opportunities among our top charities. However, we’ve received feedback that describing the fund which supports grantmaking only to our top charities as having “Maximum Impact” is confusing in light of the opportunity to support a wider range of opportunities (with potentially higher expected value) through the All Grants Fund.

Based on this feedback, we’ve decided to change the name of the Maximum Impact Fund to the Top Charities Fund.

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Changes to our top charity criteria, and a new giving option

(updated on: ) | by Elie

Since 2007, GiveWell has maintained a list of top charities. The organizations and programs on that list have changed over time, but the goal has remained the same: to help donors decide where to give.

In service of that goal, we’ve spent roughly the last year working on a plan to add to and update our criteria for top charities, so that they accurately reflect our prioritization of funding opportunities and are more helpful to donors. The revised criteria emphasize programs from which we expect high impact, with the additional requirement that we have a high degree of confidence in our expectation.

We hope these changes will also draw a brighter line for donors between our top charities and other excellent funding opportunities we support, a distinction that we haven’t always made clear. Recognizing that some donors want to contribute to grants outside our top charities list, we’re also introducing a new giving option: the All Grants Fund. Providing this option as a complement to the Maximum Impact Fund is an important step as grants to programs outside our top charities become a bigger part of our work.

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An update on GiveWell’s funding projections

| by Elie

As little as six months ago, we were in the position of having more funding available than we could spend on opportunities that met our very high cost-effectiveness bar. Today, the opposite is true—we don’t expect to have enough funding to support all the cost-effective opportunities we find.

In this post we will: provide an update on GiveWell’s projected funding position, explain how we have been successful in identifying cost-effective opportunities, and share our initial thoughts about what this update means for GiveWell’s forward-looking grantmaking strategy.

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Neil Buddy Shah has been appointed CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative

| by Elie

I am excited to share that GiveWell Managing Director Buddy Shah has been appointed CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), a major global health organization working across a range of issues including malaria prevention and maternal and neonatal health. This news is bittersweet for me. I’m sad to be losing the talent, advice, and thought partnership Buddy brought to GiveWell, but I’m thrilled that he is taking up this position—the global health sector will be stronger for it.

CHAI is gaining a great leader in Buddy. But perhaps more importantly for GiveWell and our supporters, this appointment is a signal that effective giving is contributing to more corners of the global health landscape than ever before. Buddy is a strong champion of impact maximization, and I am excited that he will apply this lens in his new role.

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We’re discontinuing the standout charity designation

(updated on: ) | by Elie

We aim to maximize our impact. That means we focus on directing funds as cost-effectively as we can. Rather than recommending a long list of potential giving options, we focus on finding the organizations that save or improve lives the most per dollar.

Going forward, we will no longer publish a list of standout charities alongside our list of top charities. We think our standout charities are excellent, but we believe donors should support top charities.

Removing standout charities will lead our website to better reflect our recommendations for donors. We hope it will reduce confusion about the difference between top and standout charities and help us direct funding as cost-effectively as possible.

We continue to see the nine standout charities we’ve shared as very strong organizations. This decision doesn’t in any way reflect changes in our evaluation of their programs.

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Introducing our new Managing Director: Dr. Neil Buddy Shah

(updated on: ) | by Elie

I’m very excited to announce that Dr. Neil Buddy Shah is joining GiveWell as Managing Director starting this summer.

We’re beyond thrilled that Buddy, a leader in the global health and development space, has chosen to be part of our team at this exciting time. We have significantly expanded our research focus over the past few years to identify high-impact giving opportunities beyond our current top charities list. In addition to working with me to set our strategy generally, a core component of Buddy’s work will be pushing our research and funding expansion forward by leading GiveWell’s efforts to learn from and contribute to the broader international development community.

He is exceptionally qualified to do so. Buddy has spent the last eight years as Founding Partner and CEO of IDinsight, a group GiveWell has worked closely with and supported through our Incubation Grants program. We’re confident that IDinsight will continue to do great work over the coming years.

Buddy is now heading the leadership transition process at IDinsight. He expects to join GiveWell around July. Welcome to the team!

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