One of the challenges of GiveWell is evaluating the quality of our own research. There are no accepted standards of what charity recommendations should be or how they should be assessed. Over the last year, we’ve been developing a method for self-evaluation based on structured writeups from people external to GiveWell (i.e., people who are…
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All Evaluation of GiveWell Posts
Self-evaluation: GiveWell as a project
This is the third post (of five) we’re planning to make focused on our self-evaluation and future plans. This post answers a set of critical questions for GiveWell stakeholders. The questions are taken from our 2010 list of questions. For each question, we discuss Where we stood as of our previous self-evaluation and plan a…
Self-evaluation: GiveWell as a donor resource
This is the second post (of five) we’re planning to make focused on our self-evaluation and future plans. This post answers a set of critical questions about the state of GiveWell as a donor resource. The questions are taken from our 2010 list of questions, with one change: “Has GiveWell covered enough areas to be…
Stats on GiveWell’s money moved and web traffic
This post provides summary metrics we look at to gauge GiveWell’s influence and growth. Our full annual review and plan will follow over the next few days. Summary We tracked over $1.5 million in donations to top charities in 2010, compared to just over $1 million in 2009. Our website traffic nearly doubled from 2009…
GiveWell’s annual self-evaluation and plan: A big picture change in priorities
As we did last year, we’re going to be posting our annual self-evaluation and plan as a series of blog posts. Our self-evaluation starts with a set of critical questions about GiveWell, intended to examine how well we’re accomplishing our high-level goals. For the most part, our high-level goals are the same as they were…
GiveWell’s annual self-evaluation and plan: Summary
We have been posting our annual self-evaluation and plan to the blog. Here’s a summary: Basic outline and questions we asked Self-Evaluation: GiveWell as a donor resource Self-Evaluation: GiveWell as a project Plan: top-level priorities Plan: specifics of research High-level summary in Excel format The documents we’ve referred to in the above posts are linked…