The GiveWell Blog

Philanthropy’s success stories

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] The first item on the agenda for GiveWell Labs is to get the broadest possible view of philanthropy: its history (what’s gone well, what hasn’t) and its current state (what’s being funded and what isn’t). On the history front, I’ve found…

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GiveWell’s plan for 2012: Specifics of research

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] We previously laid out our high-level priorities for 2012. The top two priorities are “make significant progress on GiveWell Labs” and “find more outstanding giving opportunities under the same basic framework as our existing recommendations.” This post elaborates on our plans…

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GiveWell’s plan for 2012: Top-level priorities

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] In previous posts, we discussed the progress we’ve made, where we stand, and how we can improve in core areas. This post focuses on the latter, and lays out our top-level strategic choices for the next year. The big pictureBroadly, we…

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Review of Due Diligence, by David Roodman

Due Diligence is a new book on microfinance by David Roodman. We are fans of Mr. Roodman’s work in general (we’ve previously interviewed him for our blog, discussed his research and quoted him for a testimonial), so we were eager to read this book. We weren’t disappointed: it’s thorough, it examines the case for microfinance…

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Accountability in philanthropy

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] We previously listed our five chief criteria for GiveWell Labs, an arm of our research process that will be open to any giving opportunity, no matter what form and what sector. This post further discusses the third of these criteria: “accountability.”…

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