We’re about halfway through December, which is historically when the vast majority of donations go through our website. Here’s a quick update on where things stand.

So far this year, we’ve seen significantly more money (over 3x as much) go to our recommended charities, directly through the GiveWell website, compared to last year.

The second chart above excludes December, as this month has generally completely dwarfed the others in terms of donations made through our website. The following chart shows daily donations made in December, during which the trend has continued.

Note that all charts above exclude all offline donations / donations made through other sites attributed to GiveWell; they are only capturing donations that were made directly via the GiveWell website. We’ll be giving a full overview of our estimated “money moved” when we release our annual self-evaluation in a few months.

Our web traffic is also up this year, driven primarily by an increase in organic (i.e., non-AdWords) search traffic.

We’re seeing strong growth that isn’t attributable to any particular one-off event, so we’re optimistic about future growth.

We’ve spent years looking for the most outstanding organizations we can find – organizations with demonstrable, cost-effective, powerful impacts on people’s lives. As of now, out of hundreds examined with a systematic process, we’ve found one that we think is particularly outstanding. It isn’t just outstanding by our criteria – it’s also strong on a lot of the aspects we purposefully de-emphasize but others value, such as the chance to make a large-scale and sustainable contribution well beyond its budget (more). There’s only one problem: it’s in the sector of health system logistics.

It’s been observed before that fundraising seems to work best when you can connect a person’s gift to a tangible, emotional impact. Heifer International can tell you about the “cow you’re giving for Christmas” and how it (ideally) will affect its recipient’s life. Grameen Foundation has anecdotes (example) of women who’ve used a loan as a catalyst to pull themselves out of poverty. DonorsChoose can even arrange for you to get thank-you notes from the students you’ve bought supplies for.

VillageReach’s activities include

• Training health system personnel to become logistics specialists, delivering medical supplies to all the hard-to-reach villages so that health workers working in remote health centers are no longer responsible for making the long journeys to collect their own supplies.
• Developing logistics management information system software to enable more accurate collection and reporting of health data in remote communities.
• Creating a social business to bring propane from south Mozambique to north Mozambique so that refrigerators in health centers can be more reliably powered, and can keep vaccines cold.

How do you tell that story?

One possible response is “Don’t.” In a world full of good causes, why worry about delivery systems, information management and propane in Mozambique, when we can focus on charities with more tangible, “sellable” work?

Yet we feel this response would be tantamount to defeat for the “smart giving” movement. VillageReach embodies the strengths this movement looks for – strengths that are all too hard to find most of the time. After all, if you’re bringing in tens of millions using a decades-old story, why bother with evaluation and accountability for the work happening today? What good is real impact if it isn’t rewarded with funding?

We want to see VillageReach turn its great program into a great pitch, but we’re no good at storytelling. So we’re asking for help.

If you are good at helping charities tell their stories, and you support the ideals of the “smart giving” movement, we’d like your thoughts on how VillageReach can better sell its work.

Give your advice via blog post, or blog comment, or email to us. If you make your own blog post, please make sure to notify us via email or by linking to your post in a comment here.

We’ll round up the best submissions in a future post.

Some basic materials to work off of:

• VillageReach – main website
• VillageReach-Focus: a new project of VillageReach hoping to deliver more intimate, real-time information on its progress
• Our 2009 blog post giving an informal discussion of VillageReach’s strengths and weaknesses
• A more recent blog post on some additional strengths of VillageReach

Thanks to Katya Andresen for inspiring the title of this post

Last year, we and many other groups came together in a joint press release on the “worst way to pick a charity.”. We argued that the simple, “one-size-fits-all” metric of the overhead ratio is a red herring, and that deeper analysis is needed to make sure your gift accomplishes good.

But many donors don’t have time for deeper – or any – analysis. To help them, this year three organizations – GiveWell, Philanthropedia and Root Cause – have come together with a list of 6 recommended charities.

Each of our organizations has recommended two charities, using our distinctive methodologies. Note that we haven’t vetted each others’ recommendations and do not necessarily endorse each others’ endorsements – but we think it’s important to show donors (even donors with very little time) what sorts of options they have, publicly and centrally.

As our release states, and as we’ve written before many times in the past (most recent discussion here), we think that there is currently far too much emphasis on avoiding bad charities, with the implication being that it’s fine to give to whatever charity asks most loudly once you’ve determined that they aren’t literally stealing your money. We want to change the subject from “How can donors avoid the very worst charities?” to “How can they seek out the very best?” This joint list of recommended charities is a step in that direction.

We’ve been working on a lot of changes and additions to the main GiveWell website and at this point have gone live with all of the following:

New research and recommendations on U.S. education and early childhood care. We did some work on these causes in our first year, but we’ve now gone back with our improved and more thorough research methodology.

• We’ve systematically reviewed literature on effective social programs from ChildTrends, Campbell Collaboration, Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy and MDRC.
• We’ve conducted a systematic search for charities focused on programs with strong evidence behind them.
• Our top recommendations in this cause are still Nurse-Family Partnership and KIPP, the only organizations we’ve found with both strong evidence of impact and ongoing reporting on performance. We also now recommend Invest in Kids, a small group in Colorado, and have a few more potential recommended charities under investigation.

Do-It-Yourself Charity Evaluation. If you’re looking to do your own due diligence, examining a charity or cause we haven’t covered, check out our DIY guide for suggested critical questions you can ask. We’ve covered every charitable cause we can find or think of.

This is the first donor guide we’re aware of that asks different questions for charities in different causes, rather than taking a “one-size-fits-all” approach. While it means some extra overhead in classifying your charity, it also means we’ve been able to make the questions much more concrete, specific and meaningful.

This is very much “beta” content, with room for improvement in the questions themselves and in the guide’s usability, and we are very interested in your feedback. (Note that Tactical Philanthropy and Chronicle of Philanthropy Online have already discussed this new feature.)

New ratings system. We wrote back in October that we were preparing to scrap out quantitative ratings system for charities. We have now done so. We still give marks of distinction to our top-rated charities, and we still discuss the charities that don’t get these marks of distinction, but we no longer have a “zero-to-three-star rating” for each charity. See the new details of our ratings system.

Charity downgrades. We’ve completed our annual review of our recommended charities, in which we request updated performance information, sometimes request more detailed information than we did in the first place, and rethink our evaluation in general. Three of these charities have received downgrades:

• Stop Tuberculosis Partnership remains a recommended charity, but no longer has our highest (“Gold Medal”) distinction due to some concerns about the ongoing vigilance of its monitoring and evaluation. We are still in conversations with Stop TB and may update the review again soon if and when we receive more information.
• Partners in Health has not provided us with updated and expanded information on its activities. We no longer consider it a recommended (Silver or Gold medal) organization, though we still give it the distinction of being Notable for its promising approach (and stand behind our recommendation in the context of the Haiti earthquake specifically).
• We have done some additional analysis on The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria and no longer consider it a recommended (Silver or Gold medal) organization. It was previously the lowest-rated of our recommended organizations (on the bubble of being recommended), and our more in-depth look at its monitoring and evaluation reports has left us with too many questions about its evidence of effectiveness. We still give this organization the distinction of being Notable for its transparency, and in fact we still feel that it is a model of exceptional transparency for an organization of its size.

Part of what’s going on here is a gradual raising of our bar, as we have capacity for more analysis and a substantially higher opinion of our top-rated charity VillageReach than we had last year. (In addition to a site visit that involved a lot of time spent discussing and improving our understanding of the organization, we also have updated, concrete, encouraging information on the group’s expansion plans / room for more funding.)

New external evaluations of GiveWell’s work. We have begun accumulating formal reviews of our research from non-staff members; some are scholars in relevant fields while others are simply willing volunteers. We have published the reviews we have so far and intend to add more at a faster pace from here, now that we’ve nailed down the basic ground rules of how to do external reviews of different parts of our work. Note that we have also begun collecting endorsements as a quick sign of our credibility for website visitors.

What’s next: within the next few months we will be publishing

• Extensive notes from our several months in India, including site visits to over 15 organizations.
• Research and recommendations on the general cause of disaster relief/reconstruction.
• Our annual self-evaluation.