We are not health experts, education experts, or social science experts, and we don’t pretend to be. We are donors, working through – and communicating about – the decisions all donors must work through. We do not see our role as designing, managing, improving, or measuring charitable programs; we see our role as understanding these programs as well as non-experts can, with whatever help and testimony from experts is necessary to do so, and sharing our understanding with other non-experts.

We are statistically literate and analytically strong, and we are good at attacking problems with complex and incomplete information; the people who have worked with us in the context of highly competitive and selective environments will attest to that.

But we are not experts. So why should you trust us?

You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t trust anyone to tell you what the best charities are. To a large extent, that’s why our project exists.

When we were trying to figure out where to donate, we had no trouble finding opinions, and recommendations, from experts of many kinds – ranging from foundations to famous economists to watchdogs. Of course, practically every charity we talked to had some form of expert endorsement of their own. The qualifications of these experts are impressive in all kinds of different ways.

But these recommendations didn’t help us. When we were able to scrutinize them, we found reasoning that was sometimes superficial and sometimes just plain didn’t make sense – but the most common problem, by far, was that there was simply no reasoning to be found. These kinds of recommendations don’t cut it, regardless of the resumes that back them.

As I’ve written before (recently), there is no way to evaluate charities with perfect – or even very much – certainty, safety, or precision. This much, the experts can agree on (and they do, from the little we’ve seen – much of it nonpublic – on the development of charity metrics). Intuition, judgment calls, and even philosophy are inextricable parts of every giving decision.

That’s why you can’t trust a person’s conclusion without following their reasoning – no matter who they are. And that’s why expertise in any particular area is so much less important than a commitment to true transparency, and thus to dialogue with anyone in the world – from policy professionals to philosophy Ph.D.’s to ordinary people with great ideas – who cares to participate. GiveWell has already demonstrated that commitment, to a degree we haven’t seen anywhere else.

You can see the criteria we have used so far on our website. Furthermore, all of our reviews should be explicit about why they say everything they say, and where every rating comes from. If you don’t believe they are, we want to hear about it.

There is an understandable desire for universal, “objective” criteria in the nonprofit sector. On one hand, we believe strongly in the value of measuring impact, and in the value of statistical and other analytical tools. Perhaps related to our financial backgrounds, we generally find ourselves much more interested in measurement, metrics, and statistics than the charities we talk to.

On the other hand, the decision of where to donate inherently must be based on both highly incomplete information and on philosophical considerations. A giving decision can always be reasonably criticized and questioned, yet it must always be made. And the few attempts we’ve seen to eliminate all judgment calls, and put all charities in the same terms, have resulted – in our opinion – in absurdities.

The full story of what information we’re going to collect and what metrics we’re aiming to construct is a long one. We are currently writing it up as part of our business plan, and when we’ve expressed ourselves well, we will make it available on our website. For now, our general guiding principles are as follows:

Separate charities into causes. Some goals are too hard to put in the same terms – for example, choosing between improving a New York City public school and providing a clean water source in Africa is something that different donors will feel differently about. It is not realistic, or really even theoretically possible, to collect and process enough information to make everyone agree. Because the choice between these goals has so much philosophy in it, we put the two into different buckets. A “cause” is a set of charities that we feel can reasonably be compared in the same terms – you can see our preliminary list of causes to address here.

Designate the best charities within causes, not between them. Again, the principle is to compare what we can, and let the donor choose where we can’t. It’s not an easy distinction to draw, and we have to balance separating what can’t be compared vs. doing as much meaningful and systematic comparison as possible.

Within causes, design our metrics around the idea of making a significant impact on people’s lives. We will consistently aim to measure success in terms of people, not in terms of income or life-years or anything else. For disease-fighting charities, this means lives saved; for job-creation charities, this means people who go from indigence to self-sufficiency. We are more interested in how many people a charity serves fully and meaningfully than in the theoretical mathematical product of number of people affected times size of effect. Taking this approach also makes our decisions easier for others to understand and form their own opinions on.

Recognize that the metrics we want will not always be attainable. We have already seen how often the information we want is simply not available, as well as how often the interpretation of it is extremely problematic. We are going to have to use judgment and common sense, like any other donor; the difference is that we will promote

TOTAL, EXTREME TRANSPARENCY. We simply can’t stress the importance of this enough. This is what is already unique about GiveWell, and this is the single quality that makes our evaluations more valuable than anyone else’s. Our reviews don’t just say what we concluded; they don’t just laundry-list our resources; they explain every reason that we think what we think. Anyone and everyone has the power to go through our chain of thought, disagree where they disagree, and use our information and hard work to draw their own conclusions. Furthermore, our reviews are open for all the world to see, comment on, criticize, and improve.

There is no easy way to make giving decisions, and there is no giving decision that is ironclad or close to it. This is probably why grantmakers tend not to share what goes into their decisions; it is also precisely why it is so important to do so. With problems involving this much difficulty and judgment, the single most valuable quality of an evaluation is that it be clear. That is our explicit focus, and if we are ever failing in it we want to hear about it.

Note: I am out of time right now, but will answer the third of the current set of questions within the next couple of days.

There are three answers to this. The first is that we eventually want to understand the entire nonprofit sector, because our goal is to do as much good as possible with our dollar. But doing this in the near future is completely impossible (even if we restricted ourselves to charities with budgets of at least $1 million, we’d be looking at over 80,000 organizations in the US alone!)

So we have to narrow our scope – drastically.

The second answer to the question is to say how we chose the organizations currently reviewed on GiveWell.net. Some context is necessary for this. GiveWell began as an informal project, a collaboration between friends who wanted to accomplish more good with our donations. We knew we had to bite off something we could chew, so each of us chose a cause that we were personally interested in, found organizations that focus on it, and started digging for more detail on what they do. Our goal was to find great organizations to donate to, not to be comprehensive, and we reviewed the best organizations we found; the result was the website currently up at GiveWell.net. Our reviews are straightforward about where more information is needed; nothing on this website is, or pretends to be, comprehensive or authoritative.

It was in constructing this website that we determined that the only way to do our project well is through a more concentrated effort. We are going to be far more comprehensive than we were last fall, and far less comprehensive than we hope to be eventually. The third answer to the question is what nonprofits we will seek to review in our first year.

This answer is the most complex, and we haven’t finalized our answer to it. Here’s where we stand now.

We constructed a rough map of all the problems with the world that US-registered charities (which we will be focusing on) address. (Once we make this map intelligible to an outsider, it will be available on our website.) We chose a small subset of these problems with the preliminary aim of (1) helping people who are unfortunate and disadvantaged, but not irrevocably so; (2) translating money directly and reasonably quickly into improving people’s lives, without relying on changing others’ opinions or laws. Our preliminary list of the causes we plan to address is:

Causes 1-3: aid the poorest of the poor, focusing on Africa.
Cause 1 : Provide for basic human needs including basic health care, food, water, and shelter.
Cause 2 : Fight epidemic curable/treatable diseases, including malaria, diarrhea, tuberculosis, AIDS, measles, and pneumonia.
Cause 3 : Enable economic opportunity through microcredit, job assistance and training, and education.
Causes 4-8: remove barriers to opportunity in wealthy societies, focusing on New York City.
Cause 4 : Provide for basic human needs including basic health care, food, and shelter.
Cause 5 : Aid early-childhood development, through child care and programs such as Early Head Start.
Cause 6 : Improve educational opportunities through charter schools, summer schools, after-school activities, and public school reform.
Cause 7 : Enable economic opportunity through microcredit, job assistance and training.
Cause 8 : Protect women from domestic abuse.
Causes 9-10: bring people from extreme suffering to fully enabled lives in one step.
Cause 9 : Facilitate the adoption of disadvantaged children by self-sufficient families, focusing on China.
Cause 10 : Provide full-service boarding schools to the impoverished, focusing on South Africa.

In focusing on certain regions, we are not saying that these are the only regions worth assisting with donations – we are just narrowing our scope so that we can have an attainable goal. We took the existing structure of the nonprofit sector into account, which explains why the regions vary so much in size (most of the charity in New York City is done by organizations focused on New York City, whereas most of the charity in Nigeria is done by organizations with a broad mandate of serving Africa).

Since we aim to serve US donors, we will focus initially on US-registered 501(c)(3) charities with annual expenses of at least $1 million. We want to be able to recommend these charities without fear that they’ll attract donations beyond what they can use effectively.

We will also generally not evaluate other grantmakers (such as private foundations), unless they are providing something concrete (such as consulting services or measurement) along with their evaluations, enough to justify the extra expense and loss of discretion that comes with passing money through another grantmaker.

All of this is preliminary and highly open to discussion.

(As a note to Matt, who asked this question: we are still considering Romania as a possible region of focus along the lines of causes 9-10; this list is the most likely one we will end up with for our first year, but HopeChest’s area is not far from where we’re focusing.)

Beyond Giving asks us several questions on important topics that we’ve talked about a lot but haven’t written about yet. The new “FAQ” subcategory on this blog is for posts that directly answer a common question about our project.

Here are Beyond Giving’s questions:

1) What’s your evidence that you can accomplish your stated goal of analyzing and comparing nonprofits with each other to determine which one’s can most improve the world? What objective criteria will define “the best” nonprofits to support?

3) In developing and employing your rating system, have you consulted with any experts on philanthropy, nonprofit management, fundraising, board governance, outcomes measurement, program evaluation, or any other related field in your project? In other words, what qualifies you to issue ratings of any kind?

There are three important topics here that we haven’t written about, though the topics don’t correspond exactly with the questions. I would say the topics are:

1. Scope – how do we pick organizations to review?

2. Criteria – how do we decide where to give our money and endorsements?

3. Expertise – what qualifies us to do reviews and why should people trust us?

I think that if I address these satisfactorily, I’ll cover Beyond Giving’s questions (Matt, if I’m wrong, just comment on it). So here we go.