The GiveWell Blog

All posts by GiveWell Staff

GiveWell’s 2024 Giving Recommendations

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

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.

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An Update to GiveWell’s Grant Deployment Timelines

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

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).

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Re-evaluating the Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers

| by GiveWell Staff

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.

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Finding and Vaccinating More Children

| by GiveWell Staff

We’re crossposting the first part of a blog post by New Incentives, one of our grantee organizations and Top Charities. New Incentives aims to increase vaccination coverage in Northern Nigeria by providing cash incentives to parents and caregivers.

We recognize that individual stories about a program can be misleading, as they can often highlight the best examples rather than typical cases. However, we hope that this post, about New Incentives’ efforts to reach zero-dose children, can provide another angle for understanding the efforts of our Top Charities.

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GiveWell as Moneyball

| by GiveWell Staff

If there’s one group of people who are as obsessed as we are with rigorously analyzing a complicated domain and figuring out where to prioritize scarce resources, it’s Major League Baseball front offices. With that in mind, we wanted to write this guide comparing some baseball statistics with the metrics we take into consideration when evaluating programs to save and improve lives.

Batting Average: Batting average is simple to calculate and easy to explain, and it was historically considered one of the most important ways of evaluating how good a player was. It remains one of the primary baseball stats you’ll find in the newspaper.

But as a measure of a player’s value, batting average isn’t actually all that helpful—and at times can be actively misleading. One of the two primary shortcomings of batting average is that it ignores plate appearances that end in a walk. But walks are really valuable! The Little League wisdom that “a walk is as good as a hit” is an oversimplification, but it also points us toward a statistic that’s more valuable than batting average. It turns out that on-base percentage, which considers walks (as well as the less common hit-by-pitch method of reaching base) as a successful outcome, is a better predictor of a player’s offensive value.

As an example, Juan Pierre and Adam Dunn, who both played in about 2,000 games over their careers, had lifetime batting averages of .295 and .237 respectively. At first glance this might give the impression that Pierre was the more productive hitter. Looking at on-base percentage though, we see that Dunn actually reached base more frequently than Pierre (.364 versus .343), which, combined with his propensity for hitting home runs (another indicator of offensive value that batting average ignores), made him the much more valuable career hitter. (Dunn’s negative defensive contributions are another story.)

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September 2024 Open Thread

| by GiveWell Staff

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.

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