The GiveWell Blog

All Standout charities Posts

We’re discontinuing the standout charity designation

(updated on: ) | by Elie

We aim to maximize our impact. That means we focus on directing funds as cost-effectively as we can. Rather than recommending a long list of potential giving options, we focus on finding the organizations that save or improve lives the most per dollar.

Going forward, we will no longer publish a list of standout charities alongside our list of top charities. We think our standout charities are excellent, but we believe donors should support top charities.

Removing standout charities will lead our website to better reflect our recommendations for donors. We hope it will reduce confusion about the difference between top and standout charities and help us direct funding as cost-effectively as possible.

We continue to see the nine standout charities we’ve shared as very strong organizations. This decision doesn’t in any way reflect changes in our evaluation of their programs.

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What are standout charities?

| by Catherine Hollander

GiveWell’s research process focuses on finding excellent giving opportunities and deeply reviewing them. We currently recommend just eight top charities that have met our high standards.

Although the number of top charities we recommend is small, we review a large number of organizations in our ongoing work to find new top charities. We consider some of these groups to be exceptional relative to the vast majority of organizations, even though they do not meet our top charity standards. We name these organizations standout charities to recognize their exceptional status and to provide an incentive for charities to engage with our intensive review process.

The standout charity designation, though valuable for the reasons mentioned above, has created communication challenges for us. People who rely on our recommendations to make donations have expressed confusion about how our view of standout charities compares to that of top charities.

This blog post will explain why we have standout charities and how they differ from our top charities.

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Announcing Zusha! as a standout charity

(updated on: ) | by Josh Rosenberg

We’ve added the Georgetown University Initiative on Innovation, Development, and Evaluation (gui2de)’s Zusha! Road Safety Campaign (from here on, “Zusha!”) as a standout charity; see our full review here. Standout charities do not meet all of our criteria to be a GiveWell top charity, but we believe they stand out from the vast majority of organizations we have considered. See more information about our standout charities here.

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