Yesterday we got an email from someone looking for help on where to give, noting that two of our top charities do not meet the Better Business Bureau (BBB)’s 20 standards for charity accountability. We believe that both of these organizations are reputable, accountable, and excellent, and were surprised to hear this. After checking out…
The GiveWell Blog
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Quick notes on our progress
A few updates for people interested in the nuts and bolts of GiveWell’s progress (some of these have been included in our email updates, but not yet flagged on our blog): We’ve recently (this week) updated our research agenda – see the updated agenda here. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation awarded us $100,000 for…
Beware just-published studies
A recent study on health care in Ghana has been making the rounds – first on Megan McArdle’s blog and then on Marginal Revolution and Overcoming Bias. McArdle says the study shows “little relationship between consumption and health outcomes”; the other two title their posts “The marginal value of health care in Ghana: is it…
Why we prefer the carrot to the stick
A couple of the commenters on a previous post object to our idea of “rewarding failure” and prefer to focus on “putting the bad charities out of business.” In theory, I’d like to see a world where all charities are evaluated meaningfully, and only the effective ones survive. But the world we’re in is just…
Uncharitable
Dan Pallotta sent me a copy of Uncharitable about a month ago, and I’ve been late in taking a look at it. I highly recommend it for people interested in general discussions of the nonprofit sector. The discussion I’ve seen of the book so far (Nicholas Kristof and Sean Stannard-Stockton) has focused on how much…
A proposal to reward failure
Here’s a grant idea we’d probably pursue if we had the funds to do so. I’d be interested in what other grantmakers think of it. I believe enormous good could be done by offering grants to charities that can prove their programs don’t work. Proving a program’s ineffectiveness is difficult and expensive – just as…