GiveWell is dedicated to finding outstanding giving opportunities and publishing the full details of our analysis to help donors decide where to give. The table below describes our financial performance in 2022 and 2023.
The GiveWell Blog
All posts by GiveWell Staff
Staff Members’ Personal Donations for Giving Season 2024
For this post, a number of GiveWell staff members volunteered to share the thinking behind their personal donations for the year. We’ve published similar posts in previous years. Staff are listed alphabetically by first name.
You can click the links to jump to a staff member’s entry: Araceli Steger, Calum Richards, Chandler Brotak, Dilhan Perera, Elie Hassenfeld, Erin Crossett, Julie Faller, Lauren Imholte, Maggie Lloydhauser, Natalie Crispin, Paige Henchen, Sarah Eustis-Guthrie, Steph Stojanovic, Teryn Mattox.
December 2024 Open Thread
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 previous open threads here.
GiveWell’s 2024 Giving Recommendations
Our three Giving Funds—all of which focus on maximizing the impact of your gift—were designed for donors with different preferences, and we encourage you to donate to the one that makes the most sense for you:
- If you trust GiveWell to decide where and when to allocate your donation, we recommend you donate to our Unrestricted Fund, which can be spent on any GiveWell priority, including both grantmaking and our own operating expenses. We often use unrestricted funding for our operating expenses, but when we have more than we need, we allocate the rest to grantmaking.
- If you trust GiveWell’s research and want to limit your donation to grantmaking, we recommend you donate to the All Grants Fund, which makes rolling grants to the highest-impact opportunities we can identify in global health and well-being, including some with high expected value that carry a higher risk of not achieving their potential impact.
- If you want your donation to be allocated quickly to the programs we’re most confident about, we recommend you donate to the Top Charities Fund. We expect to commit donations to this fund, which are used for the highest-priority funding needs at our four Top Charities, in the quarter after they are received.
We think donors can do a huge amount of good by supporting these funds. The rest of this post describes some of the work that donations to these funds have enabled over the past year.
An Update to GiveWell’s Grant Deployment Timelines
GiveWell aims to save and improve lives as cost-effectively as possible. That mission has an urgency, and we put a lot of effort into finding and funding high-impact giving opportunities quickly. But we also want to maximize our impact over time, and have found that high-impact interventions can take years of investment to discover, vet, launch, and scale.
As a result, we’ve begun to deploy funds across a longer time period in order to (a) avoid a scenario where we want to make cost-effective grants but can’t due to lack of funds, (b) aid long-term planning for our research team, and (c) communicate consistent expectations to grantees and potential grantees about our cost-effectiveness threshold.
Specifically, we previously aimed to allocate all funds within the same year they were raised, targeting a year-end balance of zero. Now, we plan to enter each year with sufficient funds to fully cover our grantmaking activities for that year without accounting for new donations.This approach creates greater financial stability, which we think will allow us to plan better and to achieve greater impact over time.
If you donate to our Top Charities Fund (TCF), nothing has changed. We still expect to commit TCF donations in the quarter after they are received. These changes will only apply to our unrestricted and All Grants Fund (AGF).
Re-evaluating the Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers
This year, we re-evaluated the cost effectiveness of direct cash transfers as implemented by our friends at GiveDirectly. Our complete writeup is here, and full of fascinating details, but the main headline is: we now estimate that GiveDirectly’s flagship cash program is 3 to 4 times more cost-effective than we’d previously estimated.
It is important to note two things: (1) this won’t alter our Top Charities list or our grantmaking—we believe that the programs we currently direct funding to are at least twice as cost-effective as this new estimate, so we don’t expect to support GiveDirectly’s flagship program in the near term; and (2) this update is the result of re-evaluating the evidence underpinning GiveDirectly’s program, which we hadn’t formally done since 2019—the structure of GiveDirectly’s program has not changed (though they are now carrying it out in more locations since our last evaluation).
We share more information about our research below. You can read our full, detailed report here. You can read GiveDirectly’s blog post on our re-evaluation here.