The GiveWell Blog

All Transparency Posts

GiveWell’s 2025 Grant Investigation Survey Results

| by Matt Wang

Over the past several years, GiveWell has been focused on growing, deepening, and improving our research team’s work in line with our core values of truth-seeking and transparency. As part of that effort, we’ve invited anonymous assessment of our grantmaking process in order to learn and improve.

In July 2024, we sent out our first anonymous survey to people we’ve worked with during grant investigations. While we typically ask for candid, live feedback from the organizations we work with, we had not previously invited anonymous assessment of our grantmaking process. The survey sought to better understand the extent to which we live out our values in our interactions with external organizations. The questions focused on organizations’ experiences with our grant investigation process and post-grant follow-up.

In 2025, we repeated the process with the same survey instrument and compared results to the prior year, to see what had changed and whether our daily work is reflecting our core values and operating principles.

GiveWell’s second annual grant investigation survey was sent to organizations that participated in our grant investigation process from April 2024 through July 2025. We invited a total of 122 individuals representing 75 organizations to participate, and we received 80 responses (66% response rate). Included in the total were 22 contacts from investigations that did not result in a grant, from which we received five responses.

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Results from GiveWell’s First Grantee Survey

| by Matt Wang

Recently, the GiveWell research team has focused on collecting more feedback about our work and processes, such as through our Change Our Mind contest, our Research Council, and by asking donors for feedback. While we typically ask for candid, live feedback from the organizations we work with, we had not previously invited anonymous assessment of our grantmaking process. We know our processes are different from those of many other funders, and we want to make sure our work reflects our values of maximizing global well-being, transparency, truth-seeking, and considerateness.

So, in July 2024, we sent out our first anonymous survey to people we’ve worked with during grant investigations. The survey was sent to 55 individuals representing 40 organizations that participated in a GiveWell grant investigation from January 1, 2022, to March 31, 2024. It focused on their experiences with our process and post-grant follow-up, and also included a few general questions asking for their feedback about GiveWell. We received 32 responses to the survey, a response rate of 58%. Two of the 32 responses were from organizations that did not receive a grant.

What we learned

Overall, the people who responded to our survey rated their satisfaction with GiveWell’s investigation process as 4.2 out of 5. The highest-rated areas were responsiveness and respectful communication, well-reasoned information requests, and satisfaction with the post-investigation process.

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Making our work more readable

| by Maggie Lloydhauser

Perhaps you noticed that our most recent blog post included a bit of whimsy and even a joke footnote. Our blog is changing slightly, and you can expect more of that!

When GiveWell first started blogging, the blog was a place to share broad thoughts on philanthropy and generate conversation. While we’re not planning to revert to the tone of our early blog posts (which we consider a mistake), we are trying to publish more on our blog and to make what we publish more readable. Our blog posts will be as accurate as ever, but we’re hoping that a more conversational tone will be easier to engage with.

This blog refresh stems from an organization-wide emphasis on legibility. This focus is related to our deeply held value of transparency. For people outside of GiveWell to truly evaluate the conclusions that drive our recommendations, our work needs to be not only public but also understandable.

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Early signs show that you gave more in 2020 than 2019—thank you!

(updated on: ) | by Catherine Hollander

Our donor community appears to have given significantly more in 2020 than 2019, according to early data on donations we processed.

Growth was strong relative to previous years—even 2019, which also had strong growth—and across many different dimensions. Overall, donations to GiveWell more than doubled in 2020.

We estimate that these donations will collectively save more than 12,000 lives; provide over 2 million deworming treatments to children, leading to an approximate increase in that group’s lifetime earnings of more than $21 million; and deliver almost 3,000 cash transfers to low-income households. For simplicity, the impact estimates in this paragraph exclude some donation types, and so don’t represent the full impact of donations to GiveWell in 2020.[1]

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Three grants in response to the COVID-19 pandemic

(updated on: ) | by Catherine Hollander

We began exploring opportunities to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic in March. We are excited to announce that we granted a total of $450,000 to support coronavirus-response projects run by Development Media International (DMI), IDinsight, and Yale professor Mushfiq Mobarak, respectively.

With our grant funding, we expect DMI to run or support mass media campaigns to promote essential health messages. We expect IDinsight and Professor Mobarak to support policymakers responding to the pandemic in low- and middle-income countries through data collection and analysis and by making recommendations.

Our goal at GiveWell is always to direct funding to maximize impact. This typically leads us to conduct thorough, monthslong investigations into potential grantees. However, in response to the coronavirus pandemic, we believe we can have more impact by acting quickly to prevent the spread of the disease—even if it means completing only relatively shallow grant investigations.

These three grants may save or improve lives as well as or better than our current top charities. Nevertheless, we are more uncertain about their potential impact, given our brief review. The $450,000 in grants is the full amount we’re comfortable directing to these opportunities at this time; we do not suggest additional donations beyond this amount today.

We remain very worried about the effects of the pandemic on non-coronavirus health programs as the global funding landscape shifts in response to coronavirus. The need for the programs operated by our top charities is already large and we are unsure if our top charities will receive less funding than usual in the coming year. We expect that our top charities will require significant additional resources to continue to carry out their programs.

Our recommendation to individual donors is thus unchanged: our top recommendation is to give to “Grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion,” which we will allocate quarterly among our recommended charities where we believe it will do the most good. For donors who prefer to give directly to a GiveWell top charity, we recommend Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention program. We do not expect to make coronavirus-specific recommendations for individual donors.

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The impact of COVID-19 on GiveWell’s plans

(updated on: ) | by Catherine Hollander

We hope everyone is staying well during these difficult times. We are publishing this blog post to provide a brief update on how the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic impacts our plans.

We are looking into the impact of the pandemic on the organizations we support as well as opportunities to mitigate its effects. We are in the early stages of this work and will update you as we reach conclusions.

We don’t have a new recommendation for donors: our bottom line continues to be to donate to “Grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion,” which we allocate quarterly to the highest priority need we see.

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