The GiveWell Blog

How much funding does GiveWell expect to raise through 2025?

We’re optimistic that GiveWell’s funds raised will continue to increase in the long run. Over the next few years, we believe our annual funds raised are more likely to stay relatively constant, due to a decrease in expected funding from our largest donor, Open Philanthropy, offset by an expected increase in funding from our other donors.

In November 2021, we wrote that we were anticipating rapid growth and aiming to influence $1 billion in 2025. Now, our best guess is that we’ll raise between $400 million and $800 million in 2025 (for comparison, we raised around $600 million in 2022). We now think it’s possible but unlikely that we’ll raise close to $1 billion in 2025, and we also think it’s possible but unlikely that our funds raised in 2025 will be substantially lower (e.g. around $300 million) than they were in 2022.

We’re excited about the impact we can have at any of those levels of funding, and we’ll be continuing to direct as much funding as we can raise to the most cost-effective opportunities we can find.

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The winners of the Change Our Mind Contest—and some reflections

In September, we announced the Change Our Mind Contest for critiques of our cost-effectiveness analyses. Today, we’re excited to announce the winners!

We’re very grateful that so many people engaged deeply with our work. This contest was GiveWell’s most successful effort so far to solicit external criticism from the public, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the participation of people who share our goal of allocating funding to cost-effective programs.

Overall, we received 49 entries engaging with our prompts. We were very happy with the quality of entries we received—their authors brought a great deal of thought and expertise to engaging with our cost-effectiveness analyses.

Because we were impressed by the quality of entries, we’ve decided to award two first-place prizes and eight honorable mentions. (We stated in September that we would give a minimum of one first-place, one runner-up, and one honorable mention prize.) We also awarded $20,000 to the piece of criticism that inspired this contest.

Winners are listed below, followed by our reflections on this contest and responses to the winners.

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Announcing the Change Our Mind Contest for critiques of our cost-effectiveness analyses

We’re extremely excited to be announcing the Change Our Mind Contest to encourage critiques of our cost-effectiveness analyses that could lead to substantial improvements of our overall allocation of funds. For all the details, see this page.

Cost-effectiveness is the single most important input in our decisions about what programs to recommend, and we believe it’s possible that we’re missing important considerations or making mistakes that lead us to allocate funding suboptimally. We’ve been excited to see people engaging with our cost-effectiveness analyses, and we’d like to inspire more of that engagement.

With that in mind, we’re inviting you to identify potentially important mistakes or weaknesses in our existing cost-effectiveness analyses and tell us about them!

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Staff members’ personal donations for giving season 2021

For this post, a number of GiveWell staff members volunteered to share the thinking behind their personal donations for the year. We’ve published similar posts in previous years. (See our staff giving posts from 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013.) Staff are listed alphabetically by first name.

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Staff members’ personal donations for giving season 2020

For this post, a number of GiveWell staff members volunteered to share the thinking behind their personal donations for the year. We’ve published similar posts in previous years.((See our staff giving posts from 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013.)) Staff are listed alphabetically by first name.

You can click the below links to jump to a staff member’s entry:

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