[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] Over the past few months, the main focus of GiveWell Labs has been strategic cause selection. Before diving into a particular cause, we want to make sure we’ve done a reasonable amount of work looking at all our options and picking…
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What large-scale philanthropy focuses on today
[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] We think there are two key questions for someone trying to do strategic cause selection: (1) What is the history of philanthropy – what’s worked and what hasn’t? (2) What is the current state of philanthropy – what are philanthropists focused…
Strategic cause selection
[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] Our picture of how most major foundations work is as follows: First, broad program areas or “causes” – such as “U.S. education” and “environment” – are chosen. This step is almost entirely “from the heart” – no systematic review is conducted,…
Philanthropy’s success stories
[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] The first item on the agenda for GiveWell Labs is to get the broadest possible view of philanthropy: its history (what’s gone well, what hasn’t) and its current state (what’s being funded and what isn’t). On the history front, I’ve found…
GiveWell’s plan for 2012: Specifics of research
[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] We previously laid out our high-level priorities for 2012. The top two priorities are “make significant progress on GiveWell Labs” and “find more outstanding giving opportunities under the same basic framework as our existing recommendations.” This post elaborates on our plans…
GiveWell’s plan for 2012: Top-level priorities
[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] In previous posts, we discussed the progress we’ve made, where we stand, and how we can improve in core areas. This post focuses on the latter, and lays out our top-level strategic choices for the next year. The big pictureBroadly, we…