The GiveWell Blog

The worst way to pick a charity

Today, the most common way that donors evaluate charities – when they evaluate them at all – is by asking questions about financials, such as “How much of my donation goes to programs vs. salaries?” This approach makes no sense. We’ve argued this point before at length. Picking charities based on the “overhead ratio” is…

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Denying the choice

GiveWell spends a lot of time on the question, “Should I give to charity A or charity B?” One of the things that has surprised us about the world of charity is how many people insist on answering, “Both” or “You can’t/shouldn’t be asking that question.” To them, all that matters is whether a charity…

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Medicine and philanthropy

David Leonhardt’s excellent piece on health care reminded me of the debates within philanthropy. For most of human history … [doctors’] treatments consisted of inducing vomiting or diarrhea and, most common of all, bleeding their patients … Yet patients continued to go to doctors, and many continued to put great in faith in medicine ……

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Too much attention on the giver’s experience; not enough on the recipient’s

From the recent discussion on Tactical Philanthropy: As philanthropists/donors/funders, we spend so much time thinking about how to maximize social benefit through our activities, that often we lose sight of the personal benefits that we experience from these endeavors. We disagree. Consider the current state of the nonprofit sector. We have practically no information about…

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How would a malaria vaccine affect charity?

What happens if a malaria vaccine becomes available – and is far more effective than medicine and perhaps insecticide-treated nets? I hope that all malaria charities will transition, as smoothly as they can, to assisting with immunization programs. But I’m not sure. Immunization-focused charities include the GAVI Alliance, the Measles Initiative and VillageReach. Malaria-focused charities…

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Why can’t you make the sale?

I recently attended a seminar with the fascinating Seth Godin and heard an interesting anecdote about VisionSpring: I could see that every single person who came to this meeting had enough money [$3] … to buy a pair of new reading glasses. And I could tell from how old they were that they were qualified…

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