The GiveWell Blog

Japan earthquake/tsunami relief donations

(updated on: ) | by Holden

Japan has been hit by a devastating earthquake and tsunami, and our hearts go out to those affected and responding.

Charities have been quick to solicit funding for the relief/recovery effort. Here we present our recommendations to donors, both in terms of which charities should be preferred and in terms of whether giving to this relief effort is a good opportunity overall.

At this point we strongly recommend holding off on giving to this relief/recovery effort. We believe that money isn’t a cure-all, and that there can be such a thing as an “overfunded” relief effort even in a devastating disaster. We don’t know yet whether that is the case with Japan, but we believe that the next few days will bring valuable information about it (and we will be providing updates in this space). We also believe that waiting a few days will not diminish the impact of your donations.

Where should you give? Lessons from Haiti

Over the last year, we’ve been examining the responses of major relief organizations to the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Our report grades these organizations on their transparency; the ones that stand out most are Direct Relief International, Doctors Without Borders and Partners in Health. Of these three, the first two appear to be responding to the Japan events (see these links for Doctors Without Borders and Direct Relief International).

Therefore, for donors determined to give to Japan relief/recovery, our top recommendation goes to Doctors Without Borders, followed by Direct Relief International. The reason we prefer Doctors Without Borders is because of its past decision to stop accepting donations for Haiti relief; this greatly reduces the risk in our eyes that it will over-solicit, a very important concern in this case (see immediately below).

We have also done substantial work assessing the overall spending and progress of the Haiti relief/recovery effort, and we feel that it provides an illustration of the fact that

Why Japan is different

This disaster is very different from other recent headline-making disasters. The 2005 Asian tsunami and 2010 Haiti earthquake took place in very poor countries; by contrast, Japan is a very wealthy country, with the 2nd- or 3rd-biggest economy in the world and per-person income in the same ballpark as that of the U.S.

This matters for several reasons.

  • Much better infrastructure and fewer logistical challenges. The The New York Times reports that

    Over the years, Japan has spent billions of dollars developing the most advanced technology against earthquakes and tsunamis. The Japanese, who regularly experience smaller earthquakes and have lived through major ones, know how to react to quakes and tsunamis because of regular drills — unlike Southeast Asians, many of whom died in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami because they lingered near the coast despite clear warnings to flee.

    This factor could cut both ways for donors. Facing fewer challenges could mean needing less money to respond and rebuild; however, it could also mean that there’s more of what we call room for more funding. (In the case of Haiti, logistical hurdles appear to have created many non-monetary bottlenecks to relief and recovery, as discussed above.)

  • Relief agencies are unlikely to have a strong existing local presence, and we find a local presence less relevant in general. From what we’ve seen major relief organizations (including the ones we recommend) do not have substantial existing presences in Japan, as they focus on working in less wealthy countries. Due to the likely smaller logistical challenges, we don’t think this should be a major factor in donors’ decisions.

  • There may be some challenges that are quite different from those seen in less wealthy countries, such as keeping nuclear reactors under control.
  • Most importantly, this relief effort will probably be far better-funded than those in less wealthy countries. We expect to have more specifics about this in the coming weeks, possibly even days.

Our advice: hold off for now

We believe that the vast majority of disaster relief funding is spent well after the initial crisis (example: Haiti). We also believe that the coming weeks (possibly days) will bring better information about the size of the need and the funds available to meet it. We will be posting any updates on the situation here.

For more advice, see Good Intentions are Not Enough. We particularly agree with the recommendations to (a) refrain from showing up as a volunteer; (b) give cash, not goods.

Your dollars at work: Update on top-rated charity VillageReach

(updated on: ) | by Holden

VillageReach is the first (hopefully not the last) charity for which (a) GiveWell has raised enough money to make a qualitative difference in VillageReach’s activities; (b) GiveWell has a clear enough picture of the room for more funding situation to be able to say with some confidence what that difference is.

We intend on providing periodic (aiming for quarterly) updates on VillageReach’s (a) progress in its Mozambique expansion, for which unrestricted funds have been sought; (b) revenue, projected expenses, and room for more funding.

We have posted the first such update to the Updates on VillageReach page. In a nutshell:

  • Currently, VillageReach is active in Cabo Delgado, Niassa and Maputo, and VillageReach has provided a 6-month assessment and baseline vaccination coverage survey for Cabo Delgado.
  • The overall expansion is substantially behind the schedule set out in July 2010 (on time in Cabo Delgado but 6-12 months behind for other provinces) for funding-related reasons (though revenue in 2010 closed the entire “stretch funding gap” for the year, the vast majority of that revenue was not received or anticipated until December).
  • In Cabo Delgado, data collection appears to have improved, but there are not yet other signs of improvement in the health system’s performance. This is consistent with the expected trajectory of VillageReach’s 3-year involvement in a province, and we do not find it to be a major cause for concern.
  • There has been a global supply disruption in a key vaccine that is expected to be resolved by the third quarter of 2011.
  • VillageReach had a total of about $2 million in unrestricted revenue in 2010, of which a little over $1 million can be attributed to GiveWell’s recommendation.
  • We believe that this $1 million has been key to VillageReach’s being able to plan to expand its program into the provinces of Gaza and Inhambane.
  • We believe that VillageReach has a total funding gap of about $3.6 million remaining for this project. Taking into account expected revenue from non-GiveWell-related sources leaves about $1.4 million in room for more funding. These funds would allow it to proceed as quickly as possible with its full 8-province expansion plan.

The news is not all good. The global supply disruption is a major concern for us, and a reminder of how any attempt to help can be held up by circumstances beyond one’s control. VillageReach’s reports also reveal a problem with the flow of funds between a funder and the government, and make it quite clear that there has not yet been any noticeable improvement in health system efficiency (though there has been an improvement in data collection, and this is arguably what should be expected at this stage in the project).

Overall, though, we feel better about VillageReach than we did 3 months ago because we feel we continue to have a window into the true – not stylized – impact that GiveWell-related funds are having. In our view, one of the most problematic things about charity is that people purchase something but never get to fully understand what they purchased, so the feedback loops that lead to continuous improvement in most markets are broken. This is the first case we know of where individual donors can expect to get full and frequent updates on the impact of their donations (not just how their donations were spent), and is thus a first step toward improving those feedback loops.

Evaluating GiveWell by finding the best charity

(updated on: ) | by Holden

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 not donors, Board or staff). Some of these people are early-stage volunteers with GiveWell; asking them to review us in this way gives us both valuable feedback and a window into how they think. Other reviewers have been recruited by us because their opinions seem particularly relevant due to their backgrounds (for example, Laura Freschi of Aid Watch). The goal here isn’t to produce a quantitative “score” for our research, but rather to provide some in-depth and credible outside perspectives that our audience (and we) can react to as we choose.

In most cases, the reviewer is asked to answer a very specific set of questions about a specific subset of our content: our overview of a particular issue such as developing-world education or HIV/AIDS, our heuristics for identifying promising charities, the fairness of how we’ve applied these heuristics, or our writeups on particular charities. Put these four areas together and you have our entire process for recommending charities.

However, we’ve also been experimenting with a broader approach that asks the reviewer to evaluate the whole of GiveWell’s value at once: finding the best charity to donate to within a set period of time, with no requirement that they use GiveWell to do so. We provide the reviewer with a list of all online resources we know of, including but not limited to GiveWell, and encourage the reviewer to do whatever it takes to get the best answer (including searching independently for information and calling charities directly).

We’ve run this “Finding the Best Charity” project a couple of times with volunteers, but the most recent posting is particularly interesting for a couple of reasons:

  • The reviewer was Tobias Pfutze, an Assistant Professor of Economics who co-authored a paper rating official aid agencies with William Easterly.
  • We took the project out of the hypothetical and into the real by offering a $2,500 donation to the charity of Prof. Pfutze’s choice, in exchange for the time (about 10 hours) he spent on the review. This donation was funded by Dario Amodei. Thus, this project literally represented Prof. Pfutze’s best attempt at allocating $2,500 to accomplish good.
  • Prof. Pfutze chose a charity, Living Goods, that GiveWell does not recommend – though he did find this charity through GiveWell’s website.

Prof. Pfutze’s submission is available here. It includes a paraphrased transcript of a follow up conversation we had with him, exploring our areas of agreement and disagreement.

Overall we found this project very interesting and valuable. On one hand, Prof. Pfutze was clear that he “found Givewell to be by far the most helpful website,” that he agreed with the bulk of our criteria and conclusions, and that he found our recommended charities to have strong cases behind them. On the other, he came to a substantially different conclusion from us.

It appears that he placed a substantially higher weight on the “upside” of the donation – what the project would accomplish if it went as well as possible – and in particular, on the project’s model for achieving sustainability. He found Living Goods promising because it both (a) is aiming for a highly sustainable, lasting impact; (b) gains some credibility from its ongoing evaluation in partnership with Poverty Action Lab.

We remain in disagreement with this conclusion, but think his position is defensible, well-argued and thought-provoking.

We encourage interested readers to check out his full submission including the follow-up dialogue with GiveWell. We’ve found this “Finding the Best Charity” assignment to be valuable and interesting, and we are hoping to use this same format to get more feedback in the future.

GiveWell’s plan for 2011: Specifics of research

(updated on: ) | by Holden

This is the fifth post (of five) focused on our self-evaluation and future plans.

A previous post outlined our top-level priorities for 2011. The most important priority is finding more top charities. This post lists our potential tactics for finding top charities; we are particularly interested in feedback on this topic.

These tactics are listed in order from “closest to our existing methodology; most likely to succeed” to “furthest departure from our existing methodology; most likely to take a lot of time before we can identify outstanding organizations.”

Tactic 1: deep investigations of charities with distinction.

We have a list of charities that have some form of distinction. This includes

We haven’t found sufficient information on these charities’ websites to recommend them, and based on past experience, this makes us pessimistic. However, we have begun the process of prioritizing how promising the different charities are; we will be contacting the most promising ones, interviewing staff, and thinking about the minimum information we would need to confidently recommend them. More so than in the past, we can now point to significant impact of our recommendations on donations, so we expect better access to these charities than in the past.

Tactic 2: investigating “low burden of proof” sub-causes in international aid

In the past, we’ve looked for direct evidence of charities’ impact on improving lives. As we’ve gotten more context and experience with international aid, however, a couple of causes have stood out to us as particularly recommended/promising, to the point where we may be able to be confident in a charity without the sort of impact assessment we’ve sought in the past.

  • Orphans and vulnerable children: some charities provide homes, shelters, and other basic services for children who otherwise might be homeless, sleeping on the street, or even taken in by those who exploit them. By speaking with the right people, we may gain an understanding of where and when there are needs for these sorts of organizations to expand, resulting in more children having safe homes/shelters who would not otherwise.
  • Water: if we found a charity that was demonstrably improving access to clean water, in a way that (a) benefited communities with very poor previous access to water (b) lasted over time (we are very concerned about wells being put in and falling into disrepair), we might recommend such an organization without direct evidence of improved health outcomes.

Tactic 3: investigating other promising causes

As mentioned previously, we’re experimenting with a method for quickly getting a high-level picture of a charitable cause and how likely it seems that we could find top charities in this area. By investigating particularly promising causes, such as disease research funding and catastrophic risk mitigation (including but not limited to global warming), we might be able to find more outstanding opportunities for donors.

We will certainly be pursuing this tactic, but feel it is less likely to generate top charities in 2011 than the tactics above.

Tactic 4: project funding.

We have always aimed to find great organizations and recommend unrestricted donations to them, rather than funding particular projects. This is partly because we think traditional donation restricting is unreliable; partly because we think project-based funding adds harmful complications (particularly the fact that the donor’s and charity’s goals aren’t fully aligned); and partly because, in the past, we have had so little sense of how much money (if any) our top-rated charities could expect to raise.

But if we can’t find more charities that focus – at the overall organizational level – on proven, cost-effective, scalable programs, we will open the doors to large organizations offering promising projects, and potentially recommend that donors give to these organizations with specific designations (“Use this donation for project X”).

If we go down this path, it will become essential to have concrete expectations for what will be implemented – and what will be measured and reported – at different levels of funding. (Projects also ought to be based, to the maximum extent possible, on programs that have worked in the past.) The fact that we now have a track record of moving money to top-rated charities makes this option more feasible than it was before.

We’d like to avoid project-based funding, and even if we do implement it, we’ll be keeping an eye out for organizations that we can recommend for unrestricted funding. The latter will always take precedence.

We think this tactic is promising in the long run, but unlikely to generate “gold medal” opportunities in the short run because of the difficulties we’ve had (and expect to have) communicating with grantwriters.

GiveWell’s plan for 2011: Top-level priorities

(updated on: ) | by Holden

This is the fourth post (of five) we’re planning to make focused on our self-evaluation and future plans.

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.

Broadly, we see the key aspects of GiveWell – the areas in which we can improve – as

  • Research vetting: subjecting our existing research to strong, critical scrutiny from people with substantial relevant experience and credentials.
  • Research maintenance and systemization: keeping our research up-to-date and high-quality, while training junior staff to maintain it.
  • Research expansion: actively seeking more charities to recommend.
  • Marketing: increasing our “customers” reached and money moved.
  • Fundraising/operating: maintaining the organization.

(These are broadly similar to last year’s areas for improvement.)

Our top priorities for this year are:

  1. Research expansion. As discussed previously, we have an urgent need to find more top charities so that we can productively move more money. It would be a major problem for GiveWell if we essentially had more demand for our research (i.e., donors interested in following our recommendations) than supply (i.e., charities able to absorb this funding effectively).We aim to find at least $3 million in room for more money moved, i.e., gold-medal charities that can collectively absorb at least $3 million very effectively. Finding more top charities could be very challenging and require large allocations of time from both junior and senior staff.
  2. Fundraising – as discussed in the overview of our financial situation, we have expanded our staff while seeing a couple of large sources of revenue fall off. Raising more money in 2011 will be necessary in order to maintain our operations at optimal size.We aim to raise our annual revenue from around $200,000 to around $400,000 (if we do not make it all the way to $400,000 we will cut some staff going into 2012, as outlined in our overview of our financial situation). I (Holden Karnofsky) will be taking primary responsibility for this task, and expect it to take a fair amount of time.

Other key priorities are:

  1. Research maintenance and systemization – all our research will need to be updated this year (as it is every year). We expect this work to be done primarily by junior staff.
  2. Research vetting – we believe there is substantial room for improvement in our testimonials and external reviews of our research. We expect to make improvements with relatively little investment of our time, since our process for getting testimonials and reviews is already in place.
  3. Marketing – we expect to pursue most of the ideas we listed previously for expanding our reach, with moderate time cost.
  4. High-level research of new causes – we’re experimenting with a method for getting a high-level picture of a charitable cause, without getting to the most time-consuming step of evaluating specific charities. The idea is to take a given cause – for example, global warming mitigation – and get a basic sense of what information is available, what cost-effectiveness estimates say about what can be accomplished for how much, what the key questions are for organizations, and how likely it seems that we could find top charities in this area. We hope to do high-level research on a few particularly promising causes, laying the groundwork to find more top charities in the future.

Self-evaluation: GiveWell as a project

(updated on: ) | by Holden

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 year ago.
  • Progress since then.
  • Where we stand (compared to where we eventually hope to be).
  • What we can do to improve from here.

Is GiveWell’s research process “robust,” i.e., can it be continued and maintained without relying on the co-Founders?

Where we stood as of Feb 2010

We had one full-time employee other than the co-Founders (Natalie Stone). We felt that she was capable of maintaining our international aid report with little oversight, while covering other causes would require heavy involvement from co-Founders.

Progress since Feb 2010

  • Natalie Stone has now been with GiveWell for about 18 months. She has not only worked on maintaining and expanding the international aid report, but also did the bulk of the work for a new cause – microfinance – and has also taken on miscellaneous duties such as responding to emails sent to info@givewell.org
  • We have also made another full-time hire, Simon Knutsson, who started as a volunteer, became a 30-40-hour-per-week contractor in March of 2010 and joined as a full-time employee in January 2011. He has done the bulk of the work for the U.S. Equality of Opportunity report.
  • We have systemized the process of keeping our research up to date. This process can now be done partly by junior staff and partly by volunteers, with very little participation needed from Co-Founders.
  • Because we now have useful work for volunteers to do, we’re able to use volunteer work as a way to evaluate potential hires, leading to two more new hires:
    • We hired one volunteer (Stephanie Wykstra) part-time; she has been working about 20 hours per week for us and plans on working full-time for us over the summer. She did the bulk of the work for our disaster relief report.
    • Another former volunteer (Alexander Berger) plans on coming to work full-time for us after he graduates college.

All in all, by this fall we expect to have 3.5 employees apart from the co-Founders. All will focus primarily on maintaining and expanding our existing research (and in particular, finding and evaluating particularly promising charities), a top priority for us, but all will experiment with and be available for other work as well, including work on researching new causes.

Where we stand

We have a promising set of junior staff and lots of valuable work for them to do, keeping our research up to date and thorough. These staff have promise as people who might eventually be able to run the organization entirely, but we don’t feel they’re at that point yet.

What we can do to improve

We plan on continuing to expand the scope of the work we assign to junior staff, as well as continuing to work with volunteers who may eventually become staff. This will take a good deal of time in terms of training/management overhead.

Does GiveWell present its research in a way that is likely to be persuasive and impactful (i.e., is GiveWell succeeding at “packaging” its research)?

Where we stood as of Feb 2010

We felt that our research was presented with sufficient clarity and good organization, though without emotional persuasiveness. We sought to add more external evidence of credibility and to better integrate the blog and website.

Progress since Feb 2010

As discussed in the previous post, we have added some external evidence of credibility to our website, and established a basic process for adding more. We have not made other progress on this metric; we do not consider improving the emotional persuasiveness of our work to be a priority.

Where we stand

We’re currently satisfied with the presentation of our content and don’t plan on emphasizing this goal in the near future.

What we can do to improve

At some point, more attention to the presentation of our research may be useful for broadening our audience. Right now, though, our impact appears to be growing rapidly just from our niche audience, and continuing to serve this audience well presents major challenges that are higher priorities.

Does GiveWell reach a lot of potential customers (i.e., is GiveWell succeeding at “marketing” its research)?

Where we stood as of Feb 2010; progress since Feb 2010; where we stand

As detailed previously,

  • 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 to 2010, and donations through the website nearly tripled. Our overall increase in money moved appears to be driven mostly by (a) a gain of $200,000 in six-figure donations; (b) new donors, largely acquired via search engine traffic and the outreach of Peter Singer.
  • Our growth in online donations to recommended charities was significantly faster than that of the more established online donor resources (Charity Navigator and GuideStar); our total online donations remain lower than these resources’, but are now in the same ballpark.

We have also formed a content partnership with GuideStar.

The amount of money we’re influencing is now quite significant to our top charities. As discussed previously, we now have significant concerns about “room for more money moved.”

Ultimately, we have a loose goal of reaching the point where our “money moved” is equal to, at a minimum, 9x our operating expenses. We see our operating expenses as being between $400,000-$500,000 in a steady state (details forthcoming) so this would require seeing another 150-200% growth in our money moved.

What we can do to improve

We have many ideas to continue to improve our reach. At this point we feel the most promising are:

  • Have more discussions with, and surveys of, those who use our research to decide where to give, in order to understand our audience, deepen our relationships, and ultimately find more such donors. A professional fundraiser could help significantly with this.
  • Hold fundraising events in order to make it easier for our existing supporters to bring in new supporters. We held a small event in December of 2010 focusing on VillageReach; the cost of the event was about $3,000 and it resulted in a total of $17,800 in donations to VillageReach and $7,500 in donations to GiveWell.
  • Public relations / press targeting projects aiming for earned media.
  • More active pursuit of people we consider highly influential among our target audience (the better we understand our audience, the better our ability to seek out such people).
  • Website improvements, including
    • Improving our search engine optimization. (Most of our gains in traffic in 2010 came via search.)
    • Minimizing the processing fees on donations.
    • Better encouraging donors to share their actions and recommendations with friends (using email and social media).
    • Offering donors an easy way to get reminded to donate in December. (In 2010 over 25% of the money donated through our website was on the very last day of the year.)
    • Improve our ability to track website users and understand how they found us.

Is GiveWell a healthy organization with an active Board, staff in appropriate roles, appropriate policies and procedures, etc.?

Where we stood as of Feb 2010

We were happy with our Board and other aspects of our organization.

Progress since Feb 2010

We remain happy with our Board and policies and procedures. However, we now have a significant need to raise more operating funds. In a nutshell,

  • Our improved ability to recruit and employ junior staff has resulted in increased expenses, both present and future.
  • We have lost two major sources of revenue (a major donor changed careers and the Hewlett Foundation lowered the size of its support).

Details will be forthcoming in a financial analysis document.

Where we stand

We have a significant need for more operating support and intend to make this a major priority for 2011.

What we can do to improve

We aim to raise operating support by

  • Applying for support from major institutional funders.
  • Having discussions with people who have a substantial history of being close to our project, including Board members and major “customer donors” (i.e., donors who have used our research to decide where to give), about the possibility of their supporting GiveWell directly.

We plan to continue to avoid soliciting funds from the public at large. We wish to avoid “competing with” our recommended charities for funding, and feel our credibility would be hindered if we were asking for money ourselves.

What is GiveWell’s overall impact, particularly in terms of donations influenced? Does it justify the expense of running GiveWell?

Where we stood as of Feb 2010

In 2009, we tracked just over $1 million in donations to our top charities, though over 30% of this $1 million came from pledges and restricted donations that had been made in 2008. We had a reasonably strong presence in our sector as members of the Alliance for Effective Social Investing and GuideStar Exchange Advisory Board.

Progress since Feb 2010

As discussed above, our website traffic and money moved have grown significantly and we now provide significant funding to our top-rated organizations.

We remain members of the Alliance for Effective Social Investing and GuideStar Exchange Advisory Board; we have also joined two other collaborative groups in our sector (Markets for Good and Market Development Working Group of the Social Impact Exchange) and begun a content partnership with GuideStar.

Where we stand

At this point we can point to significant impact for our top charities; the impact they, in turn, have with our additional funds remains to be seen, but we are well-positioned to evaluate it over time.

That said, our “money moved” is still not at the point we would eventually like to see, and we still do not know enough about our impact because we have little information on where donors would have given without our research. We are currently investigating the latter.

What we can do to improve

  • Survey donors on where they would have given if not for our research, to get a better sense of our overall impact. (Currently in progress.)
  • Pursue the previously outlined strategies for increasing both our “money moved” and “room for more money moved” (both are necessary).
  • Pursue long-term sustainability of the organization – in particular, continue developing junior staff and raise the operating funding needed to maintain these staff.