In a recent debate, David Hunter’s article on the nonprofit sector has taken heat for its assertion that “While nonprofits work incredibly hard, with passion and dedication, and often in incredibly difficult circumstances to solve society’s most intractable problems, there is virtually no credible evidence that most nonprofit organizations actually produce any social value.” We…
The GiveWell Blog
All GiveWell’s Philosophy Posts
“A” for effort?
Sean at Tactical Philanthropy has continued his discussion of “high-performing” vs. “high-impact” organizations, which we previously commented on. The message he is sending (see posts here and here) is partly that we need to take the emphasis off of “funding organizations that have shown results” and put it on “funding organizations that seem ‘on the…
High-impact nonprofits are rare, but worth funding
Following up on Thursday’s Alliance for Effective Social Investing meeting, Sean at Tactical Philanthropy writes: A high performance nonprofit is a very well run organization. It has outstanding leadership, clear goals, an ethic of monitoring performance and making adjustments as needed, and it is financially healthy. A high impact nonprofit is one whose efforts have…
Development experiments (randomized controlled trials) as a counterpoint to marketing materials
There’s been a minor flurry of recent blog posts about randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in international aid, including William Easterly’s take and responses by Chris Blattman and GiveWell Board member Tim Ogden. A central theme has been the difficulty of generalizing from one experiment to whether something “works in general.” There seems to be a…
Can donors fund “sustainable” projects?
It’s one thing to pay for children’s immunizations. It would be quite another to pay for a project that increased immunization rates over the long term, without continued donor support (either thanks to improvement in private-sector or government operations). Aiming for the latter – or more broadly, aiming to use donations as “startup funds” for…
The challenge of local ownership
One of the consistent refrains we’ve seen in aid literature is the importance of local participation/enthusiasm/ownership for aid projects. Many programs have been criticized for being too “top-down” (i.e., imposing outsiders’ designs on local communities), with the implication that more “bottom-up” programs (i.e., getting local people to participate in the design of execution of programs)…