Between 2/10 and 2/23, I visited two of our recommended charities: The Small Enterprise Foundation (our top-rated microfinance organization and one of two winners of our recent Economic Empowerment Grant – note that our review is not yet available but has been drafted and will be published shortly) and VillageReach (our current top-rated charity overall).

(Note that the posts I authored on our self-review and plan, which ran while I was away, were all written and scheduled before I left.)

This trip was my first time in Africa; it was also an opportunity to have more in-depth conversations with the staff of these two charities (going beyond our usual key questions about cost-effectiveness, evidence of impact and room for more funding). In future posts, I’ll be sharing some thoughts I came away with.

For now, we’ve posted as much as possible of the “raw data” from my trip: pictures, video, and audio. I recorded most interviews with clients and staff and took pictures of most of what I saw. We’ve also included summary notes of each “episode” with the pictures/video/audio. You can see it all at this link:

We’ve changed the design of our blog to incorporate it more fully within the main GiveWell site.

If you read this blog through RSS you shouldn’t notice any changes.

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Organizations we review often ask us: what can we do to improve our rating on your site?

The most obvious answer is provide the type of evidence that the rest of our top-rated charities have to demonstrate your impact. But for many organizations, providing such evidence is not possible. Many may not have the resources to conduct the evaluation needed to demonstrate success. (This strikes some as “unfair,” but our goal isn’t to be fair – it’s to find charities that “casual donors” can be truly confident in.)

There is another way to improve your rating, however: demonstrating failure. (GiveWell tries to meet this standard for ourselves on our shortcomings page.)

We give Doctors Without Borders a 1-star rating because of its publication of a report demonstrating that a program they ran failed. We write:

In our experience, charities are very rarely willing to share evidence of disappointing impact. We believe that any charity that does so is being unusually honest about the challenges of international aid, and unusually accountable to donors. We expect that charities capable of spotting, documenting and sharing disappointing results are better positioned to improve our time.

If your organization is listed on the GiveWell site and you want to improve your ranking, publish a case study of a program you ran that failed. As usual, we’re not looking for marketing materials, and we won’t accept “weaknesses that are really strengths” (or reports that blame failure entirely on insufficient funding/support from others). But if you share open, honest, unadulterated evidence of failure, you’ll join a select group of organizations that have a GiveWell star.

This is the final post (of four) we’re planning to make focused on our self-evaluation and future plans. The first post is here; the second is here; and, the third is here.

In a previous post, we laid out our reasons for focusing on the broad category of “research” over the next year. This includes

• Research vetting: subjecting our existing research to strong, critical scrutiny from people with substantial relevant experience and credentials.
• Research on new causes such as U.S. equality of opportunity, disease research funding, and environmental issues (particularly global warming mitigation).
• Research maintenance and systemization: formalizing our process to the point where it can be maintained with as little input as possible needed from the co-founders.

After considering the time and resources available to us, we’ve concluded the following:

• Research vetting will likely involve substantial “down time” (i.e., waiting for responses from the people we’re hoping to get vetting from). Therefore, it will be a major priority of ours but will not account for a huge amount of our time.
• Re: research maintenance and systemization. Over the next year, we will be pursuing one temporary expansion in capacity via a 5-month contractor (a person who has done substantial volunteer work for us in the past, and whom we feel can add greatly to our research). During that time, there will be four people putting substantial time into research: the two co-founders, our one Research Analyst, and the contractor. It would not make sense to plan more hires at this point, given the relatively small amount of well-defined work we have available and the uncertain time costs of working with both our Research Analyst and our contractor. (More reasoning at our previous post, under the heading of “Is GiveWell’s research process ‘robust’?”)
• We will be putting significant time – essentially, the time we have left over after dealing with research vetting, research maintenance and systemization, and “low-hanging fruit” in the areas of packaging and marketing – into research on new causes.

The top contenders for new causes are as follows, listed in the order in which we are currently prioritizing them:

• More sub-causes within international aid – including disaster relief/recovery, charities aiming to help orphans and vulnerable children, and more attempts to find a strong microfinance option. Because we find international aid to be a strong area for a donor, and because we have a strong sense of the major issues within it, this cause is a high priority. We expect much of the work in this area to be done by non-co-founders (i.e., our Research Analyst and/or contractor).
• U.S. equality of opportunity (early childhood care; education; employment assistance). We have already done substantial work in this area and have a concrete idea of how to create a high-quality report. We expect to be able to outsource much of the work on this report to non-co-founders. Therefore, although we don’t consider this the most worthwhile cause, the “return on investment” for us is very high in terms of what we can produce with a limited amount of work from the co-founders.
• Disease research funding. Our intuitions suggest that this is a very promising area for a donor, but we have not done any work on it to date, and as a result our research on it will be somewhat like our research on international aid was at first: open-ended, slow, and heavily dependent on co-founders, with the rate and the nature of progress difficult to predict. We hope eventually to understand enough about this area that we can apply a consistent methodology to disease research charities, as we do with our current international aid report.
• Environmental issues, particularly global warming mitigation. As with disease research, we have little background and expect a slow, open-ended process at first.

We have assembled a work plan with time estimates. Over the next year, we expect to complete research on the first two causes listed and to make some progress (though how much is difficult to predict) on disease research funding.

This is the third post (of four) we’re planning to make focused on our self-evaluation and future plans. The first post is here, and the second post is here.

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 choice for the next year.

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

Research, i.e., creating and maintaining useful information for impact-focused donors. This includes

• Research vetting: subjecting our existing research to strong, critical scrutiny from people with substantial relevant experience and credentials.
• Research on new causes such as U.S. equality of opportunity, disease research funding, and environmental issues (particularly global warming mitigation).
• Research maintenance and systemization: formalizing our process to the point where it can be maintained with as little input as possible needed from the co-founders.

Packaging, i.e., presenting our research in a way that is likely to be persuasive and impactful. This includes

• Consolidating/writing up/improving the case for our research’s credibility.
• Improving our website so that it is clearer and easier to use.
• Finding new ways to express the output of our research in ways that are more emotionally/intellectually compelling.

Marketing, i.e., increasing the number of potential “customers” we reach. This includes.

• Improving the persuasiveness and clarity of our research.
• Pursuing partnerships with other donor/consumer resources.
• Pursuing partnerships with donor-advised funds and wealth advisors, which might connect us to wealthy individuals seeking help with their giving decisions.
• Pursuing partnerships with people and organizations that focus on fundraising for particular causes, rather than particular organizations. GiveWell’s research could help such organizations fundraise for outstanding organizations within their causes (and outsource responsibility for finding such organizations and justifying their choices).
• Pursuing partnerships with corporate giving programs.
• Advertising.
• Concerted efforts at “earned media,” i.e., focusing our research on issues that are likely to interest the media (which are frequently the opposite of the issues we find most interesting and important) and engaging in concerted public relations efforts around these issues.

Research vs. packaging/marketing

One of the core debates that comes up repeatedly among GiveWell stakeholders is whether we should focus on research or packaging marketing.

In brief, the “focus on packaging/marketing” view is that:

• Our research is already more useful, for impact-focused donors, than other available resources.
• Our reach, and impact, leave much to be desired.
• Therefore, we should focus on reaching more people. Doing so will lead to quicker learning about the odds of GiveWell’s ultimately succeeding, as well as quicker learning about what our potential “customers” want from our research.

The “focus on research” view is that:

• We have substantial room for improvement in the credibility of our research (who endorses it), the breadth of our research (how many causes we’ve covered), and the robustness of our research (how dependent our process is on the co-founders).
• Improving these areas could be very important to later packaging/marketing efforts. (Having knowledge of more causes could substantially affect our strategy for “packaging” our research in ways that people are likely to find interesting. Both the number of causes and the overall credibility could be important to many of the potential partners mentioned under our marketing options.)
• Many of the most promising marketing strategies can be expected to benefit from the simple passage of time. We are interested in partnering with organizations that take a long time to make decisions and prefer that their partners have significant track records / be relatively established.
• While our research, as well as the passage of time, could substantially affect the way we package/market, the results of packaging/marketing (and the passage of time) are unlikely to have much effect on how we do our research. It therefore makes sense to work more on research before focusing on packaging/marketing.
• We believe that we are only ~2 years away from having broad, robust, credible research that could then be maintained at a relatively low cost (both in terms of funds and human resources). Therefore, we think it is practical and desirable to reach this point before focusing on packaging/marketing.
• Research is our core competency. The content we created for impact-focused donors is what makes us unique and it’s what we feel we do best. By contrast, we don’t consider ourselves particularly good at packaging or marketing. By focusing on research and making all of our output public and free, we enable others (who may be much better at packaging/marketing) to use and adapt it. (Peter Singer is an example of someone who has marketed our research better than we could.)

We have had many internal discussions on these issues. At this point, all members of GiveWell’s Board and staff feel that the “focus on research” view is stronger.

Therefore, we intend to focus on research over the next year, while allocating some time to the “lowest-hanging fruit” within packaging/marketing.

A future post will discuss the specifics of how we’re prioritizing the different aspects of “research.”