This time of year, just about every news agency publishes an article titled something like “6 tips to give wisely this holiday season.” (Examples here, here, and here.) The advice they give makes sense to a degree – make sure the charity isn’t a scam, check that the CEO’s salary doesn’t account for 90% of…
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Conference call discussing our top charities, Dec. 8, 7p Eastern
We put a lot of effort into making our research process and reasoning transparent so that anyone can understand and vet the thinking behind our charity recommendations. Consistent with this, we will be holding a conference call on December 8, 7p Eastern, open to anyone who registers via our online form. Staff will take questions…
New charity recommendations forthcoming by December 1; blog posts on hold until then
As we wrote previously, we’re expecting to have a substantially revised set of charity recommendations by December 1. We’re currently in the final stages of writing up our cases for top contenders and discussing which will be top-rated. Because of this, we plan to suspend our blog posts (which are normally at least weekly) until…
Working for GiveWell
If you’re interested in working or volunteering for GiveWell, now would be a good time to let us know. We’ve been a 7-person team for the last couple of months, but since two of the hires were temporary, we’re soon going to be back down to 5. We were happy with our productivity when we…
A good volunteer is hard to find
We’ve written before about how volunteers often end up costing charities more in time and resources than the work they do for the organization is worth. (Charities seem to justify taking on these volunteers because of they often become donors and informal fundraisers for the charity.) In our experience, valuable volunteers are rare. The people…
How much time do charities spend participating in GiveWell’s process?
In May, we emailed all the charities we have analyzed in-depth asking them to fill out a brief survey about their experiences with our process. We asked: How much time did you spend on our process? How clear were you at the outset about what our process would entail? Do you think, looking back, that…