The GiveWell Blog

Japan earthquake/tsunami relief donations

Japan has been hit by a devastating earthquake and tsunami, and our hearts go out to those affected and responding. Charities have been quick to solicit funding for the relief/recovery effort. Here we present our recommendations to donors, both in terms of which charities should be preferred and in terms of whether giving to this…

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Your dollars at work: Update on top-rated charity VillageReach

VillageReach is the first (hopefully not the last) charity for which (a) GiveWell has raised enough money to make a qualitative difference in VillageReach’s activities; (b) GiveWell has a clear enough picture of the room for more funding situation to be able to say with some confidence what that difference is. We intend on providing…

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Evaluating GiveWell by finding the best charity

One of the challenges of GiveWell is evaluating the quality of our own research. There are no accepted standards of what charity recommendations should be or how they should be assessed. Over the last year, we’ve been developing a method for self-evaluation based on structured writeups from people external to GiveWell (i.e., people who are…

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GiveWell’s plan for 2011: Specifics of research

This is the fifth post (of five) focused on our self-evaluation and future plans. A previous post outlined our top-level priorities for 2011. The most important priority is finding more top charities. This post lists our potential tactics for finding top charities; we are particularly interested in feedback on this topic. These tactics are listed…

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GiveWell’s plan for 2011: Top-level priorities

This is the fourth post (of five) we’re planning to make focused on our self-evaluation and future plans. 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….

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Self-evaluation: GiveWell as a project

This is the third post (of five) we’re planning to make focused on our self-evaluation and future plans. This post answers a set of critical questions for GiveWell stakeholders. The questions are taken from our 2010 list of questions. For each question, we discuss Where we stood as of our previous self-evaluation and plan a…

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