The GiveWell Blog

Assessing disaster relief organizations

Over the past year, we have been examining disaster relief organizations, with particular attention to the quality of the information they provide on their work in the 2004 Asian tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake. We don’t think disaster relief is the best cause for impact-oriented donors and we are unable (details below) to apply…

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Animal welfare charities

Added 7/15/21: This blog post reflects the personal views of GiveWell’s co-founder in 2010; it does not represent GiveWell’s organizational view on animal welfare as a cause area. For more on why we don’t currently focus on animal welfare, see here. We’ve gotten some questions about whether we plan to research charities working on animal…

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The best charity that no one has heard of: Response roundup

Two weeks ago, we issued a challenge for people to help our top-rated charity, VillageReach, tell its story in a more compelling way. We got a lot of responses, many of them very thoughtful and interesting. Here’s a summary. Making it personal (and tangible) Many of the suggestions revolved around telling tangible, personal stories of…

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The best charity that no one has heard of: How would you tell its story?

We’ve spent years looking for the most outstanding organizations we can find – organizations with demonstrable, cost-effective, powerful impacts on people’s lives. As of now, out of hundreds examined with a systematic process, we’ve found one that we think is particularly outstanding. It isn’t just outstanding by our criteria – it’s also strong on a…

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New content: New research report, new ratings system, DIY Guide, and self-evaluation

We’ve been working on a lot of changes and additions to the main GiveWell website and at this point have gone live with all of the following: New research and recommendations on U.S. education and early childhood care. We did some work on these causes in our first year, but we’ve now gone back with…

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